Philip Roth, recalling a visit to Prague in 1971, said he was struck by the contrasting situation of writers in a country that is not free and in the United States. Here, it seemed to him, "everything goes and nothing matters"; there, "nothing goes and everything matters." It is this concern that seems to underline the trilogy that Roth began with "The Ghost Writer," continued with "Zuckerman Unbound" and now concludes with "The Anatomy Lesson."

Certainly, Roth's fictitious novelist, Nathan Zuckerman, faces neither censorship nor imprisonment in his rapid journey up the freeway of American literary notoriety. What Zuckerman does face is an ambitious and egocentric self, strong on nerve and stomach, weak in empathy—an impoverished self that is at once his only resource and his major stumbling block. In "The Ghost Writer," Zuckerman is a young beginner who tastes critical approval without the popularity that is the dream of artists no less than of politicians and other performers. A few years later, in "Zuckerman Unbound," Zuckerman attains fame with the publication of "Carnovsky," a novel not unlike Roth's own "Portnoy's Complaint." But Zuckerman gains his renown at the expense of his family, who feel betrayed by his apparent caricatures of them in "Carnovsky," and despite the critics, who consider the novel sensational and shallow.

If it is difficult to feel sorry for Zuckerman, his family or his critics, it may be because they all indeed inhabit a country in which "everything goes and nothing matters." But the country inhabited by Zuckerman is not so much a political or geographical entity as it is a state of mind. Self-indulgence and moral vacuity do not characterize the fiction of all American writers by any means….

It is not clear that Zuckerman has it in him to create serious fiction, though he proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that he can disturb, or to use Roth's words, he can be a "pain in the neck" to himself and to all who come near him. The trouble with "The Anatomy Lesson" is that it illustrates the pain and the pointlessness of Zuckerman's plight all too well. Like its central figure, the novel is a collection of symptoms, a host of problems.

Through long dramatic monologues, Roth explores the mind of an author who is the personification of chronic irritation as artistic stance. In "The Anatomy Lesson," Zuckerman is depicted as middle-aged, out of ideas, emotionally exhausted and living in a state of perpetual physical pain….

This contemporary Job does not fall into his suffering from a previously lofty position of righteousness, and he cannot be described as patriarchal, except in the pejorative sense in which the word is used today by feminists. Nonetheless, he has comforters—four women who perform various clerical, domestic and sexual services….

Zuckerman's comforters provide temporary diversion, but they cannot cure him. Like massage, acupuncture, hypnosis, special collars, pillows, braces and particularly drugs and alcohol, the women become indistinguishable from the ailment. Zuckerman dissolves and absorbs them until they become symptomatic variants. (p. 1)

[As] the novel ends, Zuckerman is … wandering around the hospital "as though he still believed that he could unchain himself from a future as a man apart and escape the corpus that was his."

The play on the word "corpus" as body and collected writings, in combination with the irony of that last sentence, suggests that there is supposed to be a lesson in "The Anatomy Lesson." In contrast with more conventional didactic fiction, however, it is the writer (and only incidentally the reader) for whom the moral seems to be intended. Roth has written, not a contemporary defense of fiction or poetry, but of the writer as bankrupt. Bereft of ideas, subject matter and self-confidence, the writer is nonetheless bound to his profession as he is to his own body….

Where this leaves the reader is an interesting question, and one that Roth does not ignore. Like much contemporary fiction. "The Anatomy Lesson" contains its own varieties of reader response. There is the reader-as-adoring-mother, for whom Zuckerman can do no wrong. There are readers-as-the-four-women-comforters who bring their own problems to the book and think that rubbing them together with those of the author will bring on mild temporary relief all around. Then there is Milton Appel, the reader-as-arch-critic, self-righteous, learned, accusatory, looking for "War and Peace" in every new novel and never finding it.

Finally, there is the reader-as-female-limousine-driver in Chicago, trying to get on with her work while Zuckerman rants and raves from the back seat…. For her, the talkative passenger is a nuisance, a "pain in the neck." With her, the reader of this book can too easily identify:

"This is my car and I do what I like. I work for myself…. I don't want to be under contract to you."

"Because you are a … feminist."

"No, because that partition between you and me in this car is there for me as well. Because the truth is I'm not interested at all in your life."

Given the insight with which he anticipates the reaction of readers, there is no doubt that Roth sees the problem with fiction that has no subject other than its lack of a subject…. If Roth's writer must endure what Samuel Beckett calls "the long anguish of vagrancy and freedom," its source seems to lie deep within himself. The author-narrator-character does not merely occupy stage center; he insists on being stage, cast, director and audience all in one. Few could survive such exposure. The humor, abuse and verbal fireworks are not brilliant enough to make the vacuum bearable. (p. 23)