It's remarkable that Bellow, Styron, Malamud and Roth have all written novels in which the central character is a writer, more or less closely identifiable with the author whose name appears on the title-page. It's also rather interesting, to my mind, that all these writers are men; while they write about their problems as writers, women writers write about their problems as women. The American public, undeniably, receives these confessions with fascinated appetite, but it isn't axiomatic that a writer's life is of richer significance than the lives of the whaling captains or tobacco farmers chronicled in earlier American novels. In [The Anatomy Lesson], Zuckerman remarks: 'Other people. Somebody should have told me about them a long time ago.' It's slipped in as a casual, wry wisecrack, but it brings home with unintended sharpness the first serious limitation of this kind of novel.

There are other limitations...