'The Anatomy Lesson is a ferocious, heartfelt book - lavish with laughs and flamboyant inventions' John Updike With his fortieth birthday receding into the distance, along with his hairline and his most successful novel, the writer Nathan Zuckerman comes down with a mysterious affliction - pure pain, beginning in his neck and shoulders, invading his torso, and taking possession of his spirit. Zuckerman, whose work was his life, finds himself physically unable to write a line. He treks from one doctor to another, but none ...
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'The Anatomy Lesson is a ferocious, heartfelt book - lavish with laughs and flamboyant inventions' John Updike With his fortieth birthday receding into the distance, along with his hairline and his most successful novel, the writer Nathan Zuckerman comes down with a mysterious affliction - pure pain, beginning in his neck and shoulders, invading his torso, and taking possession of his spirit. Zuckerman, whose work was his life, finds himself physically unable to write a line. He treks from one doctor to another, but none can find a cause for the pain and nobody can assuage it. Could it be, he wonders to himself, that the cause of the pain is nothing less than the books he has written? As he grapples with this possibility, he tries an onslaught of painkillers, then vodka, and finally marijuana. He contemplates threatening the pain with suicide, attempting to scare it out of his system. He toys with the prospect of a dramatic career change. What will it take for the pain to finally leave him alone?
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Add this copy of The Anatomy Lesson to cart. $2.93, very good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Atlanta rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Austell, GA, UNITED STATES, published 1983 by Farrar Straus Giroux.
Add this copy of The Anatomy Lesson to cart. $2.93, very good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Reno rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Reno, NV, UNITED STATES, published 1983 by Farrar Straus Giroux.
Add this copy of The Anatomy Lesson to cart. $2.93, very good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Dallas rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Dallas, TX, UNITED STATES, published 1983 by Farrar Straus Giroux.
Add this copy of The Anatomy Lesson to cart. $3.00, very good condition, Sold by Midtown Scholar Bookstore rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Harrisburg, PA, UNITED STATES, published 1983 by Farrar Straus & Giroux.
Add this copy of The Anatomy Lesson to cart. $3.01, very good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Dallas rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Dallas, TX, UNITED STATES, published 1996 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
Add this copy of The Anatomy Lesson to cart. $3.01, good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Atlanta rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Austell, GA, UNITED STATES, published 1996 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
Add this copy of The Anatomy Lesson to cart. $3.01, good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Reno rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Reno, NV, UNITED STATES, published 1996 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
Add this copy of The Anatomy Lesson to cart. $3.01, good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Dallas rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Dallas, TX, UNITED STATES, published 1996 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
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"The Anatomy Lesson" (1983) is the third of a trilogy of Philip Roth novels about an American Jewish novelist, Nathan Zuckerman. Zuckerman has at least vague resemblances to what readers might imagine as the character of Roth. Throughout the book, Roth plays on these resemblances, teasing the reader about the extent to which the writer and his fictional protagonist may be the same. The relationship between author and character is only one of the many studied ambiguities and themes in this book.
The story is told in the third person, perhaps to separate Roth from Zuckerman. It is set primarily in 1973, shortly after Watergate. At the age of 40, Zuckerman has written four novels but has suffered from writer's block for four years. When he published his fourth and highly successful novel, "Carnovsky", his father and brother reacted sharply as they thought the book mocked the family and American Jews. On his death bed, the father cursed Zuckerman. About a year after the father's death, Zuckerman's mother died. Roth's first sentence in the book is "[w]hen he is sick every man wants his mother." Thus Zuckerman has been suffering from severe neck and back pains which the finest of New York City's specialists cannot diagnose or cure, and he becomes dependent upon the ministrations of women.
The book features a mixture of Roth's bravado and sharp humor on the one hand and seriousness and introspection on the other hand. Ego is on full display. Much of the story moves forward through long conversations between Zukerman and a variety of other characters in the book. There are many arguments and verbal confrontations.
A major theme of the book is the loneliness and isolation of the life of a writer. Zuckerman portrays himself, with some reason, is sitting in a bare quiet room from his 20's struggling to develop and think through language and character and stories. His libido as always is in the way as Zuckerman has gone through and divorced what he describes as three "exemplary" wives. Zuckerman also is stung by criticism of his work, even though his novels have attained great popularity and have made him financially comfortable. Midway in the book, the frustrated writer forms the idea of going back to school, changing professions, and becoming a doctor. He imagines that as a physician he could do clearcut good for people and avoid the ambiguities, bickering, and loneliness attendant to writing. Besides dealing with the process and nature of writing, Zuckerman has issues with his strong sexuality and, even more so, with his Jewishness.
The novel is in two broad parts. The first part takes place with Zuckerman with his illness and writer's block in New York City. He is tended to by four women, each of whom offers him care as well as sex in varied forms. The opening gradually turns to Zuckerman's relationship to a critic named Appel who has written a lengthy essay rejecting Zuckerman's work for what he sees as its hostility to American Judaism. Following the Yom Kippur War, Zuckerman learns that Appel wants him to write a New York Times essay responding to criticism of Israel. Zuckerman reacts angrily, in the process addressing sore issues about his relationship to his family, to the community in which he grew up, and to Judaism.
The second part of the book is set in Chicago. Full of painkillers, drugs, and alcohol, Zuckerman travels to the University of Chicago in pursuit of his will-of-the wisp dream to become a physician. This is the stronger, livelier part of the book, full of outrageously brilliant, ribald, and yet introspective writing. To a variety of people, including, the unfortunate businessman sharing a plane seat with him, and a young woman working as a chauffeur, Zuckerman portrays himself as a successful and unscrupulous hard core pornographer with the name of his nemesis, Appel, en route to a meeting with Hugh Heffner. Zuckerman also meets with an old high school friend who has become a doctor and a medical school professor. Zuckerman's writers block, if not his illnes, seems to disappear as his imagination becomes overworked in his depiction of himeslf as the publisher of pornographic magazines and movies and the proprietor of a swingers' club.
The novel manages to combine bravura and wit with considerable seriousness and thought. The book portrays well the sense of inner conflict that invariably accompanies writing or serious intellectual or creative effort. The books in Roth's Zukerman trilogy each stand on their own and do not require knowledge of the other books in the series to be enjoyed and pondered.
