When Zuckerman Unbound appeared two years ago, it was widely assumed to be Nathan's farewell to his past and Philip Roth's farewell to his alter ego Nathan. But Roth had a trilogy in mind.

As The Anatomy Lesson demonstrates, Nathan's problems were just beginning. During the next four years, his self-esteem withered under one assault after another until he no longer knew if his talent was still intact. The death of his mother left him mourning over unfinished business; his brother blamed him for both parents' deaths and stopped speaking to him; a hugely respected critic—once a supporter—published a savage attack, legitimizing middlebrow accusations that had been leveled against him earlier….

Add to this a confluence of psychosomatic ailments which has altered Nathan's calling to that of a full-time patient…. After four … years of inactivity, however, Nathan takes action. He decides, at 40, to go for the road not taken, and flies to his alma mater, the University of Chicago, with the intention of entering medical school….

[A broad] outline tells very little about the substance and richness—the satiric bravura—of The Anatomy Lesson, but it brings up a couple of preliminary matters that have become almost inescapable in discussing the gripes of Roth: can the book stand alone without reference to, first, Roth's other work, and, second, Roth himself? The answer in the first instance is a resounding no, in the second an apologetic yes. Anyone who resents Roth for demanding of his readers as much devotion as, say, John Jakes demands of his will derive little pleasure from the latest installment. Indeed, early readers of The Anatomy Lesson have already echoed those reviewers of Zuckerman Unbound who were piqued by Roth's presumption of familiarity with his previous work. This type of reader is impatient for Roth to get to his big novel (his great American novel?), and will continue to miss the impressive scope—perhaps even the inspired japery—of the Zuckerman trilogy until it appears between one set of hard covers.

The Anatomy Lesson isn't necessarily dependent on the earlier novels for plot elements; it can be read—if not fully savored—on its own. Yet the trilogy gains irony and gravity from the manifold ways in which the three volumes interlock. In Zuckerman Unbound, Roth succumbed to Walter Brennan Syndrome and gave the best and funniest part to a supporting character, the former TV quiz kid, Alvin Pepler; Nathan's plight paled by comparison. The Anatomy Lesson redeems its predecessor, putting the middle volume and Nathan in perspective, and highlighting themes only sketched the first and second times around. It clarifies Roth's ambivalence about Nathan.

Roth is a deeply moral writer for all the exuberance of his wise-guy wit, and the Zuckerman trilogy approaches the decorous imperatives of an exemplary novel. Nathan was made, transformed, undone, and revived by literature, and our interest in him is as much sustained by the lessons he seems to learn (but, in fact, incompletely grasps) as by Roth's comic brilliance. (p. 43)

Make what you will of Zuckerman's various manifestations, and suffice it to say that familiarity with, at the very least, Portnoy's Complaint, My Life As a Man, and the trilogy is necessary to relish Roth's gamesmanship about what literature is and does to American readers and writers. It might be argued that too much depends on the reader's memories of Alex Portnoy and the furor over his complaint. The trilogy doesn't tell us what kind of writer Zuckerman is; we know nothing about the content of Carnovsky other than a few clues that make it indistinguishable from Portnoy's Complaint—this in a work which insists, page after page, that a writer is not his characters, that an imaginative process transforms life into something else. If you don't know Portnoy, you can barely imagine Carnovsky, and if you don't recall the impact Portnoy/Carnovsky had in 1969 (there's been nothing like it since), you might feel impatient with the entire conceit.

Roth gets away with it partly because Portnoy is so well remembered. (pp. 43-4)

[The] Portnoy experience prepared [Roth] for a new subject, an expansion of his corpus. Roth's stunning, if belatedly recognized, return to form with My Life As a Man (he's been on a roll ever since) established, among other signs of a dazzling increase in powers, his willingness to aim at a particular kind of reader—one who shares with Roth a nearly collegiate enthusiasm for literature's gods and ghosts. He strikes a special chord with the peculiarly American—even peculiarly Jewish American—version of first-generation intellectuals, who, like Roth, discovered literature in school, used it to rebel against their bourgeois backgrounds, and were left to ponder its political and medicinal uses….

The critic Milton Appel [Roth's fictional version of Irving Howe; see Howe's essay in CLC, Vol. 2] is the source of some of the most riotous passages Roth has written…. Appel is always offstage—his only dialogue is heard over the phone, during which conversation he sounds "wearyingly intelligent," as Wilfred Sheed once said of Howe. Otherwise, we know him by what he writes—or by what Zuckerman chooses to tell us about what he writes; he is the critic as ogre, a comfort to the philistines and a probable source of Zuckerman's mysterious pain….

As fictional invention, Appel is an inspired foil. Nathan rails at him with dialectic, occasionally fatuous, branding him as an aesthete suddenly sympathetic to "the ghetto world of their traditional fathers now that the traditional fathers are filed for safekeeping in Beth Moses Memorial Park."…

Appel and Zuckerman represent two generations of apostasy from the Jewish bourgeoisie (which, needless to say, doesn't differ much from any other bourgeoisie)—both feel less pride in their own bookishness than shame at their parents' lack of it. Nathan is outraged at Appel's hypocrisy as an intellectual mandarin who suddenly pretends solidarity with the Catskills culture that is the butt of Zuckerman's satire. But he's also plain wounded by the devastating attack from a writer he once admired…. (p. 44)

Clearly, Zuckerman is learning something about the consequences of literature. Diminished to a blathering Beckettian mouth while prostrate on his mat before a harem of willing mother-substitutes, he finds himself turning into his fictional stand-in Carnovsky, "smothered with mothers and shouting at Jews." He blames his "whammied" muscles on Appel's "Jewish evil eye," and when he finally confronts Appel on the phone, Nathan sounds disconcertingly like a Jewish father defending himself against the superiority of his over-educated son…. [When] his impotent rage is exacerbated by a plea from Appel on behalf of Israel, he's tempted to repeat what Carnovsky/Portnoy shouted at 14—that the world can take its concern for the good of the Jews and shove it. Roth, anticipating his readers as usual, restrains Nathan, who is thereby "demonstrating to himself if to no one else the difference between character and author….

Zuckerman's revenge—his intricate, "burning" improvisation on the idea of Appel as porn tycoon—is a splendidly deranged metaphor for the practical uses of art. Roth's revenge, on the other hand, raises questions of propriety. He has waited 10 years to respond to Howe, and for all the textual validity of his conceit, there is blood on the page. Previous literary feuds on the order of the Lewis-De Voto and Wilson-Nabokov exchanges were relative models of decorum. Because Roth has scrupulously adhered to verifiable facts regarding Appel's attacks and positions (they are unmistakably Howe's), the reader must wonder how much of the less easily verified information also relates to Howe. (pp. 44-5)

Even in the age of the true-life novel, Roth would appear to be treading on precarious ground. But, of course, Kafka-disciple that he is, he practically begs for the critical abuse he earns. It's the wise guy in him, laughing all the way through the gauntlet, comforted by the knowledge that he is offending all the wrong people for all the right reasons—fulfilling the admonishment of his favorite "sit-down comic" Kafka to do more harm to your contemporaries than they do you. Still, in many respects he is quite fair to Appel. Howe's essay doesn't stand up against Portnoy's Complaint because it fails to comprehend its intentions or appreciate its comic extravagance…. But Howe does real damage to Goodbye Columbus when he argues that "even a philistine character has certain rights, if not as a philistine then at least as a character in whose 'reality' we are being asked to believe."…

Roth, after all, has long since become too good a novelist to cheat a character—philistine or critic—of his integrity, and when Appel is finally heard from (on the phone), he is sufficiently convincing and sensible to enfeeble Zuckerman's rage and turn it back on him. Nathan is riddled with doubt: "What if twenty years of writing has just been so much helplessness before a compulsion—submission to a lowly, inconsequential compulsion that I've dignified with all my principles, a compulsion probably not all that different from what made my mother clean the house for five hours every day." Who would have thought that the shifty and prolific Philip Roth would become the poet of literary terrors, the bard of block?

For most of The Anatomy Lesson, Roth's narrative hand is wonderfully sure, his comic timing worthy of the Ritz brothers, with whom Zuckerman compares himself, his voice unencumbered by the typographical screaming of Portnoy's Complaint. Not since Henry Miller has anyone learned to be as funny and compassionate and brutal and plaintive in the space of a paragraph. Juggling elegiac passages with broad lampoon, Roth frequently keeps the reader off balance.

Roth is frequently accused of having turned his back on Judaic culture, and, to be sure, there is nothing in his writing to suggest much interest in the covenant with Moses…. But Judaic culture is also the secular world in which American Jews find themselves living, and far from turning his back on it, Roth has given a texture and shape to that experience unmatched in the work of his contemporaries. Far from ignoring his birthright, he celebrates its cultural resonance in his diction and themes. In refusing to demand special dispensation for Jews, he's been able to engender a howl that is quintessentially American, though infused with a Jewish accent and energy. Roth is one of those rare writers whose books are keenly awaited for the sense they might make of insensible times. Because he writes with a firm and gentle hand on the tillers—literary and personal—of the past, and delineates the spleen of urban isolation with a steadier mixture of exuberance and intelligence than anyone else around, he's in the enviable position, at 50, of still being promising. (p. 45)