It's remarkable that Bellow, Styron, Malamud and Roth have all written novels in which the central character is a writer, more or less closely identifiable with the author whose name appears on the title-page. It's also rather interesting, to my mind, that all these writers are men; while they write about their problems as writers, women writers write about their problems as women. The American public, undeniably, receives these confessions with fascinated appetite, but it isn't axiomatic that a writer's life is of richer significance than the lives of the whaling captains or tobacco farmers chronicled in earlier American novels. In [The Anatomy Lesson], Zuckerman remarks: 'Other people. Somebody should have told me about them a long time ago.' It's slipped in as a casual, wry wisecrack, but it brings home with unintended sharpness the first serious limitation of this kind of novel.

There are other limitations, no less grave. Whereas a writer can observe a tobacco farmer with detachment, the primary condition of truth, he can't bring the same detachment to writing about himself—nor, it must be added sadly, to writing about rival novelists, editors or critics, who are described here with a malicious vengefulness that reduces long passages to the level of the snide gossip column. While Roth appears to be portraying Zuckerman with devastating frankness, the thoughtful reader is far from convinced that Zuckerman-Roth really is like this. He may be a better man or a worse, but the writer himself isn't the one to know. (pp. 27-8)

In fact, the crippling vice of the self-absorbed novel is its tone of unjustified self-importance. Roth's big commercial success was Portnoy's Complaint, an amusing novel which has dated considerably since it achieved a succès de scandale in 1968. Thousands of words in Zuckerman Unbound, and more thousands of words in The Anatomy Lesson, are taken up with the question of whether this book could be considered anti-Semitic. One might imagine that we are talking about The Merchant of Venice.

But, because of Roth's indifference to 'other people', what stands out isn't his (debatable) inaccuracy about Jews so much as his assumption that Jews of his class and generation are the only people with whom he need concern himself. He goes on and on in these books about the way in which the Newark in which he grew up has been ruined since it became a predominantly black town. It doesn't occur to him that the blacks might have their own community structure, their own values and pleasures, which at least contribute to the diversity of American urban life. Nor does it occur to him that the people of older American stock who predominated in Newark earlier in this century may have thought that it was ruined, or changed in a way that nostalgia inclined them to regret, by the Jews. I don't say this because I have any particular views on the matter…. I say it because respect for the outlook of those who are different from oneself, and indeed simple curiosity, are qualities of which no writer should divest himself.

Like Roth's other novels, The Anatomy Lesson is an easily readable book. Here and there, it is very funny. Although there are no real characters except Zuckerman himself (the women are presented only as satisfying or unsatisfying from his angle), there are several sharp and witty vignettes. The writing is practised and skilful. The last 30 pages—worth persisting for—are a successful exercise in Grand Guignol horror. Yet the enjoyments that it provides are radically different from the satisfaction to be derived from the work of a writer like Kundera, who aims not at effect but at exploration. The lack of such a purpose means that self-absorption, instead of rising to self-analysis, merely descends to self-pity, which is as tedious in literature as in life. This, ultimately, is what makes The Anatomy Lesson a boring book despite the periodic infusions of vitality. I was glad to get to the end. (p. 28)