The Anatomy Lesson

By Philip Roth

Categories: Literature & Fiction

Roth's third Zuckerman novel, from 1983, finds Nathan at forty, famous, alone and suffering from a mysterious pain in his neck and shoulders that no doctor can cure. Unable to write, attacked by a critic and nursed by several women, he decides to give up literature and go back to Chicago to become a doctor, with results both comic and painful for everyone involved.

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• Barack Obama: “Some of the great books by Jewish authors like Philip Roth or Saul Bellow, they are steeped with this sense of being an outsider, longing to get in, not sure what you're giving up — what you're willing to give up and what you're not willing to give up.”