The Anatomy Lesson
A Novel
Philip Roth
The third novel in the Zuckerman series, The Anatomy Lesson is a masterful tragicomedy that follows Roth's famed protagonist into his darkest days and most hilarious encounters as he comes down with a mysterious affliction.
At forty, Nathan Zuckerman begins exhibiting strange symptoms: a pain emerges in his neck and works its way down his body, finally taking over his spirit. He can barely move, much less write, and all his doctors are baffled. Zuckerman turns to liquor, weed, and painkillers to cope, as well as submitting to the lavishing attentions of four women who ply him with food, stories, and sexual favors. As time stretches on and the pain will not abate, Zuckerman's quest for relief escalates into wilder and more confused adventures until he can hardly tell the difference between the symptoms and the treatment.
The Anatomy Lesson is a great comedy of illness written in what the English critic Hermione Lee has described as "a manner at once ... brash and thoughtful ... lyrical and wry, which projects through comic expostulations and confessions...a knowing, humane authority." The Anatomy Lesson provides some of the funniest scenes in all of Roth's fiction as well as some of the fiercest.
"The Anatomy Lesson is a ferocious, heartfelt book ... lavish with laughs and flamboyant inventions." —John Updike, The New Yorker
“Roth has a genius for the comedy of entrapment…. [He] writes America’s most raucously funny novels.” —Time
“One of Roth’s most unsparing and revealing books … forceful and startling." —Newsday
“The Anatomy Lesson is a ferocious, heartfelt book … lavish with laughs and flamboyant inventions.” —The New Yorker
"The Anatomy Lesson is breathtaking stuff, fiction of grit and energy and pizazz." —Washington Post
"Opening the first page of any Philip Roth is like hearing the ignition on a boiler roar into life." —The Guardian
"This is a beautifully worked and comic novel by a writer at the height of his powers." —Sunday Telegraph
About the Author
Philip Roth (1933–2018) was one of the most prolific and provocative American novelists of the twentieth century. Born in Newark, New Jersey, the city that anchors much of his fiction, he made his debut with Goodbye, Columbus, which won the National Book Award in 1960. He went on to publish more than thirty books, among them Portnoy's Complaint, The Ghost Writer, American Pastoral, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America. His recurring alter egos, Nathan Zuckerman and David Kepesh, allowed him to probe Jewish American identity, desire, mortality, and the pressures of history with relentless candor. Roth received the National Jewish Book Award three times, the National Book Award twice, the National Book Critics Circle Award twice, the PEN/Faulkner Award three times, the Man Booker International Prize, and the National Medal of Arts. He retired from writing in 2012 and died in New York in 2018.