The Anatomy Lesson (Vintage International)

by Philip Roth

To so easily answer a father’s need! It was a job for which he’d received an excellent education—for which he’d displayed prodigious talent even as a very small boy. Only when he was fully grown did the task for which his other talents equipped him keep getting in the way. How he went about that estranged him from father, mother, brother, and then from three wives—rooted more in the writing than in them, the sacrificial relationship with the books and not with the people who’d helped to inspire them. As the years passed, along with the charge of being out of reach, there were sexual complaints from the wives. Then the pain, so persistent as to estrange him even from the writing. On the playmat every other predicament, large or small, was inconceivable: no character imaginable other than the one in pain. What prevents my recovery, what I do or what I don’t do? What does this illness want with me anyway? Or is it I who want something from it? The interrogation had no useful purpose, yet the sole motif of his existence was this hourly search for the missing meaning. Had he kept a pain diary, the only entry would have been one word: Myself.