Description
Book Synopsis''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 wi
Trade Review
Scorchingly funny, gravely disconcerting * Harold Pinter *
The Anatomy Lesson is breathtaking stuff, fiction of grit and energy and pizazz * Washington Post *
Roth has a genius for the comedy of entrapment...He writes America's most raucously funny novels * The Time *
Opening the first page of any Philip Roth is like hearing the ignition on a boiler roar into life * Guardian *
This is a beautifully worked and comic novel by a writer at the height of his powers * Sunday Telegraph *
