Why is the novel infectious? Or to put it another way, why do infectious diseases make for great fiction?
Over Christmas I read two daunting tales of epidemic mortal illness. The earliest of these is the prologue to one of the most rollicking ancestors of the modern novel, Boccaccio's The Decameron. If you come to Boccaccio's notorious 14th-century banquet of storytelling expecting sauce and spice, you first have to shudder through his detailed, disturbing account of the Black Death in medieval Florence. He spares no horror in his portrait of a society breaking down, the ceremony of funeral rites and the humanity of medical attention abandoned, wives and husbands fleeing one another – the rich partying madly, the poor dying in their hovels.
This may be Boccaccio's truly original and lingering contribution to the art of the novel. In the face of epidemic disease, a city loses the veneer of normal routines. The very bone of the moral order, the sinews that bind people to one another, can be seen. The novel is a social genre. At its richest, it is not about solitary individuals, but about relationships, antagonisms, and responsibilities. Since nothing so tests a community as disease, it makes sense that novelists have returned to this theme over the centuries, with Boccaccio's chronicle eerily echoed by Daniel Defoe and Albert Camus.
Recently another masterpiece has been added to the literature of epidemic. Philip Roth's Nemesis is the other book I read in the holidays with sombre fascination. This mesmerically imagined work of realism tells of an outbreak of polio in Newark, New Jersey in the 1940s. Fans of Roth will know that place and time well. It is where he grew up, and where some of the most vivid passages in his novels are set. Indeed the voices and faces, the tenements and melting summer asphalt of Newark more than half a century ago have maybe never been more precisely recreated in any of his books than in this shocking gem of what he calls his "late" style. But this is emphatically not just one for the fans.
Shorn of comedy, done forever with ingratiation, Roth's terse late works are nothing if not courageous. Just when it seemed he was ready to leave readers, if not writing, behind, here is one of his most universal books. It is a story anyone can relate to and a novel everyone should read: for Roth finds the essence of human sorrow in Newark's polio outbreak as Boccaccio found it in the plague. Here he pares the novel to essentials, and for him, those essentials have to do with our compulsion to be moral beings and the tragedies that ensue. If you have never read any Roth or if for some reason you don't like him, read Nemesis. It is a master class in literature and life, that reaches into the pits of the dead.
