Summary

The novel opens in New York City in the early 1970s. Novelist Nathan Zuckerman is 40 years old and is struggling with severe chronic pain in his neck, shoulders, and upper arms. He wears an orthopedic collar to help ease the pain, but it is not always effective, and wearing the collar is often as distracting as the pain itself. Zuckerman reads a poem by George Herbert entitled “The Collar,” but Zuckerman is repulsed by the poem’s grandiosity. Zuckerman refuses to make his pain or his collar “a metaphor for anything grandiose” (6). Zuckerman finds that his pain makes it nearly impossible to write. Zuckerman has hired multiple different women to help him with daily tasks, and he has also initiated sexual relationships with these women. Zuckerman has been divorced several times and has now been unmarried for several years; he finds that he...