“‘Zuckerman finally realized that his mother had been his only love.’ When she dies, in Florida, he takes away from her effects an old book of hers called “Your Baby’s Care;” on the page headed “Feeding,” which prescribes emptying the breasts by hand every 24 hours; he finds a stain that he believes to have been left by a drop of her milk, expressed in 1933, and he closes his eyes and puts his tongue to the dry page. Adult infantilism can go no further.”
John Updike, review of Philip Roth’s The Anatomy Lesson, in The New Yorker, Nov. 7, ’83