The Anatomy Lesson concludes Philip Roth's comic trilogy
"Does he know his sentence?" "No," said the officer, eager to go on with his exposition . . . "There would be no point in telling him. He'll learn it on his body."
—Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony
Nearly 25 years after Goodbye, Columbus brought him early fame and 15 years since Portnoy 's Complaint made him notorious and rich, Philip Roth continues to be misunderstood, or understood too quickly. There are causes for confusion: the contrast between the high-minded explainer of literary culture and the unbuttoned comedian who writes America's most raucously funny novels; the zigzagging from realism to fantasy, political satire to slapstick; and the dual image of the Connecticut country gentleman and the writing drudge whose spiritual home is Kafka's Prague.
There is also the matter of Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's fictional alter id and hero of a comic trilogy that has forever flattened the myth of the glamorous writing life. Zuckerman, of course, is not Roth but rather the fullest and most personal expression of a theme that has come to dominate his work: the mayhem unleashed by those who would escape their pasts. This may be what David Kepesh in Roth's The Professor of Desire had in mind when he spoke stiltedly of "the destructive power—of those who see a way out of the shell of restrictions and convention, out of the pervasive boredom and the stifling despair, out of the painful marital situations and the endemic social falsity, into what they take to be a vibrant and desirable life." Kepesh, a randy academic, discovered his freakish freedom in The Breast, a tale about a man who turned into a mammary gland.
Roth has a genius for the comedy of entrapment. He is an uncompromising myth buster with a taste for bruising intimacy. Neil Klugman of Goodbye, Columbus and Alexander Portnoy were devoid of sentimentality and nostalgia for a lost paradise. Their Newark neighborhood had its charms, but it was basically a staging area for an assault on the sophisticated culture of New York, perhaps even London and Paris. The golden ghettos of suburbia struck them as Newarks with wall-to-wall carpeting.
Ambitious boy kicks burg is a familiar story, and central to the Zuckerman books. The Ghost Hunter (1979) introduced a young Nathan, like Roth a Newark-born writer who was hailed as the most promising voice in American letters. Zuckerman Unbound (1981) found the hero in his 30s, beleaguered by celebrity and controversy. Carnovsky, a Portnoy-like novel, had angered the community and his own family. His father's dying word to his son was "Bastard." Roth's father, a retired insurance executive, is a vigorous supporter of his son's work.