Hyman Bloom admired works by artists such as Soutine ("Carcass of Beef", 1924) and Rembrandt ("Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp", 1632; "The Slaughtered Ox", 1655) that explored similar themes. He called the colors of a decaying corpse he had seen in a morgue "harrowing" and yet "beautiful...iridescent and pearly." Many of Bloom's paintings feature rabbis, usually holding the Torah. According to Bloom, his intentions were more artistic than religious. He began questioning his Jewish faith early in life, and painted rabbis, he claimed, because that was what he knew. Over the course of his career he produced dozens of paintings of
The Anatomy Lesson (Roth novel) of writing autobiographical novels," adding, "no modern writer, perhaps no writer, has taken self-examination so far and so literally." In "The New Yorker", John Updike was more complimentary finding, "The postmodernist writer's bind is expressed in flat authoritative accents reminiscent of Hemingway...Throughout, a beautiful passion to be honest propels the grinding, whining paragraphs. Yet, though lavish with laughs and flamboyant invention, "The Anatomy Lesson" seemed to this Roth fan the least successful of the Zuckerman trio, the least objectified and coherent." The first and second books in the Zuckerman trilogy are 1979's "The Ghost Writer" and 1981's "Zuckerman Unbound". The