The Anatomy Lesson (Morley novel) a notable book by "The New York Times Book Review". The Anatomy Lesson (Morley novel) The Anatomy Lesson (1995) is a novel by John David Morley, inspired by Rembrandt’s painting "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp". In Amsterdam, the streetwise, drug-addled, Dutch-American teenager Kiddo lives in the shadow of his hero-worshipped older brother, Morton, a brilliant science student who, having completed his physics and engineering Ph.D., is to take up a fellowship at M.I.T.. But, after Morton’s premature death from a virulent strain of cancer, Kiddo begins to uncover a shadow-side to his brother’s existence, even as he wrestles
The Anatomy Lesson (Morley novel) dead-on portrait of inept parents and aimless youth,” concluded Joanne Wilkinson in Booklist. “Blackly funny,” wrote Alex Clark in "The Observer", “but breathtakingly bleak.” “John David Morley is known to European and American literary connoisseurs as a writer who merits serious attention”, Bettina Drew wrote in "The Washington Post", before hailing the author's latest work as “a serious meditation on despair and loss and our inability to really know the people we love.” After "Pictures from the Water Trade" in 1985 and "The Feast of Fools" in 1994, "The Anatomy Lesson" became the third of Morley's novels to be designated