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    The Anatomy Lesson: A Novel
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    The Anatomy Lesson: A Novel
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    The Anatomy Lesson: A Novel
    Ebook260 pages5 hours

    The Anatomy Lesson: A Novel

    By Philip Roth

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Philip Roth's The Anatomy Lesson was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

    A comic masterpiece and brilliant finale to the Zuckerman trilogy.

    The writer Nathan Zukerman comes down with a mysterious physical affliction--pure pain, beginning in his neck and shoulders, invading his torso and taking possession of his life. Zukerman, whose work was his life, is unable to write a line. Now his work is trekking from one doctor to the next--from orthopedist to osteopath to neurologist to psychiatrist--but none can find a cause for the pain and nobody can assuage it.

    So begins Philip Roth's strangely comic new novel, The Anatomy Lesson. In it, we find Nathan Zukerman beset at age forty not only by his pain but by his past. He seriously wonders if he ought to be a novelist at all. At his wit's end, bewildered by both the obstinate pain and the isolating profession, and unconsolable by his "harem of Florence Nightingales"--Gloria, his accountant's wildly mothering wife; Jaga, the depressed Polish refuge from the hair-treatment clinic (to add to his suffering, Zukerman is going bald); Diana, the distressingly self-possessed Finch College heiress; and the temptingly levelheaded painter Jenny--Zukerman tries to pin his catastrophe on some source he can confront.

    There is no shortage of candidates. Zukerman's brother blames his acerbic bestseller Carnovsky, for ruining the lives of their late parents, and will have nothing to do with him. There's the critic Milton Appel, once Zuckerman's literary conscience, now his scourge--the Grand Inquisitor of Inquiry magazine, the New York Jewish cultural monthly. Searching desperately for a diagnosis that will lead to a cure, Zuckerman asks himself if the pain can have been caused by his adversaries, or by his astonishingly intractable grief for his mother, or by the disgust he has come to feel for the literary vocation he once loved. And while he is wondering, his dependence on painkillers grows into an addiction to Percodan, marijuana, and hundred-proof vodka.

    In the last half of The Anatomy Lesson, Zuckerman breaks out of invalid imprisonment in his Manhattan apartment and sets off on a journey to escape the pain, the adversaries, the grief, and the career--a journey into a new existence, a search for a "second life." Persuaded that a doctor's life is everything a writer's is not, Zuckerman flies to Chicago with the intention of applying to medical school at his alma mater. Though the pain he encounters there is worse even than what he's fled, the startling quest for the second life provides some of the funniest scenes in all of Roth's fiction.

    With the serious playfulness and extravagant insistence characteristic of his work, Roth, in his fourteenth published book, presents an astonishing antithesis to The Magic Mountain: The Anatomy Lesson is a great comedy of illness. Roth's strength has always been the ability to depict the boisterous, the farcical, and the extreme in human behavior while revealing at the same time a world that immediately strikes the reader as real--what the English critic Hermione Lee has called, in writing of Roth's career, "a manner at once...brash and thoughtful...lyrical and wry, which projects through comic expostulations and confessions of the speakers a knowing, humane authority." The Anatomy Lesson is one of Roth's finest achievements in this vein.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJul 2, 2013
    ISBN9781466846395
    Unavailable
    The Anatomy Lesson: A Novel
    Author

    Philip Roth

    PHILIP ROTH (1933–2018) won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral in 1997. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others. He twice won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004” and the W.H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year, making Roth the first writer in the forty-six-year history of the prize to win it twice. In 2005 Roth became the third living American writer to have his works published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. In 2012 he won Spain’s highest honor, the Prince of Asturias Award, and in 2013 he received France’s highest honor, Commander of the Legion of Honor.

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    Reviews for The Anatomy Lesson

    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      Hell of a ride: stand-up comedian turned novelist, words words words, he never stops talking. Sometimes annoying, but also addictive and hilarious. Strong language all over the place as well as psychoanalytics. Sounds familiar? Yes, Woody Allen in script.
    • 5/5
      Zuckerman bound is a four-volume trilogy plus epilogue comprising The ghost writer, Zuckerman unbound, The anatomy lesson and epilogue The Prague Orgy. It is a series of novels describing the rise of a Jewish novelist who resembles Philip Roth. Identity, particularly Jewish identity is one of the main themes in Roth's work.I did not care much for The ghost writer which I read in 1996, and then abandoned the trilogy, but picking it up last November and reading Zuckerman unbound, I was gripped again as with many of his great novels.While The ghost writer describes the struggles of the young, beginning writer, both the struggles with identity and carving out a place as a writer, in Zuckerman unbound the main character Nathan Zuckerman achieves celebrity status. At this stage the theme of identity gains a new dimensions broadening into exploring private and public appearance, and shaping a new identity as a successful, rich author.The anatomy lesson is the next book in the trilogy. It is quitessential Roth. This novel is absolutely hilarious. I will never again look in the same way at a play mat. This novels is a must-read for fans of Roth.
    • 4/5
      Far and away the most rewarding of the first three Zuckerman books. Is that because Roth is just a less cliched character as he gets older? I find that hard to believe. But it makes me wonder- if you're writing what is essentially autobiography, and you're committed to not lying, how hard is it to attain any artistic unity? Not sure Roth did it in the Ghost Writer or in Z. Unbound; here he manages a bit better. Maybe that's just because the Portrait of the Young Artist thing of GW is mind bogglingly tired, and the Portrait of the Famous Artist thing wasn't done so well in ZU.
      But here the really big topics are dealt with reasonably well: death, pain, guilt, escapism. You get some early Roth ranting, which is always fun; Roth feels emotional pain because of the ranting which is interesting; and Roth thinks a little ponderously about reflecting on his early ranting: "If you get out of yourself you can't be a writer because the personal ingredient is what gets you going, and if you hang on to the personal ingredient any longer you'll disappear right up your own asshole." Of course, this is in the third volume of an autobiography and in his thirteenth or so book, so maybe the thought is a little late; maybe it's meant to be clever clever ambiguity; I like to think he actually realized the problem he faced and tried to think seriously about it. I'm not sure he overcame it, here or elsewhere, but this book seems to treat the problem in a comparatively dignified manner.

      Two catches: does Roth realize that the insane feminist-bashing he spews forth under the name of his nemesis is more or less replicated in The Human Stain? And how will the schematic psychologizing will look in fifty years? It's already a bit frayed. Some critics approve of it ('if Z has a failed relationship at age 40, we remember his failed relationship at age 23, and his guilt over his mother at age 12' and so on), but I find it irritating; obviously I hope history supports my own impeccable feelings.
    • 5/5
      (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)As regular visitors know, I'm in the midst of reading all nine of the autobiographical "Nathan Zuckerman" novels that author Philip Roth has penned over the decades, from 1979's The Ghost Writer to 2007's Exit Ghost. And that's because, as a newish book critic (only three years full-time now), I'm continually trying to educate myself more about the periods of literary history I know the least about, which would definitely include the Postmodernist Era, which lasted roughly from Kennedy's death to 9/11 (deliberately depressing touchstones chosen because of this period mostly marked by a preoccupation with the downfall of America, or more generally the downfall of all post-industrial Western lifestyles); and many say that one cannot get any better of a dense yet simplified look at that era than to read all of Roth's Zuckerman books, since he not only spent most of his adult life in this period (in his thirties at the beginning, in his seventies by the end) but is also one of the more revered artists of this period, as a result living a very typical Postmodernist life (as dutifully recorded in these lightly fictionalized true-life tales) even while helping to shape what those "typical" issues were for society as a whole.I've already covered his first book, The Ghost Writer, Roth's look back at his twenties as a hot young star of very late Modernism, publishing his first New Yorker stories at the same time as his fellow Postmodernist pioneers as John Updike, Norman Mailer and more, in the case of this book looking at it all through the filter of the naive Zuckerman attending a boozy "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" type dinner in rural New England with a Saul Bellow stand-in, an older and more successful writer who is ambivalent about his status as a 20th-century trailblazer in Jewish literature, actually written twenty years after the relevant events described; and I've already reviewed his second novel in the series as well, the highly popular Zuckerman Unbound, a frank and sometimes self-scathing look at Roth's thirties, when his funny and filthy Portnoy's Complaint became an accidental international bestseller, and helped kick off an entire countercultural series of nebbishly "sexy" young urban Jews like Woody Allen and the like, fictionalized here into Zuckerman's Carnovsky and which has ignited a mostly generational fiery debate among the Jewish community, for laying out in a funny yet revealing proto-Seinfeld way all the foibles and personality tics of that community, tropes we now generally find endearing (the guilt-inducing Jewish mother, the crazy uncle full of anti-Semite conspiracy theories) but that were highly controversial to talk about at the time that Roth did.And the reason I mention this in such detail is that today's book under review, 1983's The Anatomy Lesson, is in many ways about the same subjects, just with Zuckerman now in his forties (the book's set in the Ford/Carter years of the mid-'70s), and how time and further revelations have now changed the way he look at all these topics. Because this is a sadder and more complicated Zuckerman we're seeing here, one whose parents have recently died and whose brother accuses Carnovsky of killing, which Nathan thinks of in a complex way -- sometimes wishing that he had done things differently, sometimes angry over the fact that his parents could've "gotten it" if they had tried, but had chosen instead to be deliberately insulted by him airing their community's "dirty laundry" to the cackling laughter of a Gentile audience. And like I said, this does two things at once; because since so many of Roth's fellow baby-boomers had similarly contentious relationships with their parents over their countercultural beliefs, and since it's so common to lose one's parents in one's forties, Roth ends up speaking to his entire generation in this novel, even as it also exists as a specific roman a clef about the ups and downs of intellectual fame, of being a reluctant sex symbol in a "let it all hang out" age, and more.But let me also make it clear that, of the five Roth novels I've now read (the three mentioned, 2004's The Plot Against America, and 2009's The Humbling), this is the first one to make me regularly giggle out loud in public all the way through it, and I mean to the point where it was annoying my neighbors at the cafe; and that's because this is also a very funny look at the Male Mid-Life Crisis, and all the ridiculous attitudes and actions that come with it. That's actually where the name of the book comes from -- because as it opens, we find a 40-year-old Zuckerman suffering from a mysterious back pain that has nearly hobbled him, which a dozen different doctors haven't yet been able to diagnose, even as he is also becoming more and more aware of his rapidly corroding body (thinning hair, softening belly), eventually requiring just to get through his day his "harem of Florence Nightingales," a cadre of four women who play different roles in his life but in one way or another help to take care of him, some of whom also regularly have kinky sex with him despite his injuries. (He props up his head during oral sex with a thousand-page thesaurus, given to him by his proudly blue-collar immigrant father in the 1940s as he headed off for college at the University of Chicago; and that single sentence right there gives you a pretty good snapshot look at Roth's entire career.)Tired of his role as a public intellectual and scourge of feminists and conservative Jews nationwide, on the spur of a moment one day Zuckerman decides that what he really wants to do is move back to Chicago and go to medical school (yet another development the novel's title alludes to), figuring that he'll be ready to have a nice quiet practice completely out of the limelight by the time he's fifty; but this is where the zany part comes in, as it often does with humorous Postmodernist Jewish artists, because Zuckerman happens to be self-medicating for his pain at the time, through a combination of vodka, weed, and Percodan overdoses, which makes him come to believe that a spur-of-the-moment trip to Chicago is in order, to hit up an old college friend who's now a doctor for a med-school recommendation, the surrealism upped more and more through the continual cocktail of controlled substances he downs all the way there, which by the time he's in Chicago has him babbling in morphine-fueled monologues to anyone who will listen about how he's actually a Larry-Flynt-type publisher of hardcore smut who is there to kick Hugh Hefner's ass, proudly proclaiming his name to be actually the name of a Jewish book critic who has panned all of Zuckerman's books. (And for my fellow Chicagoans, don't miss the amazingly nostalgic and detailed reminisces about the city in the 1950s that Roth offers up in this section, including fantastic descriptions of a run-down Mid-Century-Modernist Loop, and getting drunk with Thomas Mann in the still-existing Hyde Park dive-bar institution Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap.) The whole thing culminates, then, with a series of wonderful little surprises which is why I won't spoil things, but suffice to say that things end on a somber note but that has interesting things to say about the aging and maturation process.It's Roth really at the top of his form for the first time, coming into his mature voice here in the early '80s just in time for his most revered work, award-winning novels like American Pastoral and The Human Stain that he will be best remembered for; but at the same time, it's also a timeless look at middle-age and the issues that all people in their early forties go through (although especially nebbish, oversexed intellectuals in their early forties), which on top of simply being a good history book now gives you triple the usual reasons to read it yourself. I have to say, three titles in now, I'm really glad so far that I decided to take on the Zuckerman novels, and this latest has me looking that much more forward now to the next in the series, 1985's provocatively titled The Prague Orgy, an experimental novella in which we follow Zuckerman's journal as he travels to Communist Czechoslovakia to seek a missing manuscript from a martyred Yiddish writer. Here's hoping it'll be as good as the first three volumes.