(2 of 5)
In Act III, The Anatomy Lesson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 291 pages; $14.95), Mr. Z. is battling disillusionment and the grand paradox of the writer's life: "Chicago had sprung him from Jewish New Jersey, then fiction took over and boomeranged him right back. He wasn't the first: they fled Newark, New Jersey, and Camden, Ohio, and Sauk Centre, Minnesota, and Asheville, North Carolina; they couldn't stand the ignorance, the feuds, the boredom, the righteousness, the bigotry, the repetitious narrow-minded types; they couldn't endure the smallness; and then they spent the rest of their lives thinking about nothing else. Of all the tens of thousands who flee, those setting the pace for the exodus are the exiles who fail to get away. Not getting away becomes their job—it's what they do all day."
Nathan Zuckerman, now 40, spends many of his waking hours stretched on the floor with Roget's Thesaurus under his head. He suffers from chronic, undiagnosed pain in the neck, arms and shoulders. "When he is sick, every man wants his mother," begins Roth. "If she's not around, other women must do. Zuckerman was making do with four other women." In turn, they feed him, read his mail and distract him with sex as he lies nearly motionless on his playmat.
The veteran novelist is too conscious of his unconscious to believe that the agony is mere retribution for his novels. "No," Zuckerman reasons, "if the pain intended to accomplish something truly worthwhile, it would not be to strengthen his adamancy but to undo the stranglehold ... Let the others write the books. Leave the fate of literature in their good hands."
Fed up with writing ("ten talons clawing at twenty-six letters"), he heads for the University of Chicago with plans to enroll in medical school. The decision restores his creative urges in an unfortunate way. He buttonholes strangers with wildly obscene monologues describing himself as Milton Appel, a no-holds-barred pornographer. Appel is the name of Zuckerman's nemesis, a leading literary critic who once branded Carnovsky and its author vulgar and demeaning.
Zuckerman is propelled through Chicago by pain, anger, remorse, Percodan, alcohol and a woman driver in wicked black boots. He is undone by a visit to a Jewish cemetery. Burdened by guilt, he attacks an aged mourner and cries: "We are the dead. These bones in boxes are the Jewish living! These are the people running the show!" The last things he sees before regaining consciousness in the hospital are his driver's boots. His jaw is broken and must be wired shut.
Zuckerman's comeuppance leaves little to the imagination, though Roth teases the reader with two possibilities: his most personal character has either been kicked or fallen on a gravestone. In any case, he is silent because he has nothing more to say; or to put it another way, Roth has exhausted the possibilities of his character.