Sabbath's Theater (1995)

Philip Roth is one of my favorite authors, and while there is plenty to like about Sabbath's Theater, I can't help but feel that of the 15+ books of his I've read, none quite so perfectly showcases all the things that Roth does wrong.

There's a lot of evidence that Roth is a misogynist, and while this book isn't quite as anti-woman as My Life As a Man, it's still a shining example of the way he treats his female characters. In Sabbath's Theater, they are all completely one dimensional. Perfect or evil sums up the entirety of their personalities, and their only purpose is to propel the story of the men - usually by being a penis-receptacle.

Fans of Portnoy's Complaint will love this book, because it's chock full of eye-roll inducing 'sexy' scenes. I know many people who've only read a book or two of Roth's think this is what he's 'known for', but I assure you his better books don't fall back on this stupid, "I'm going to titillate and shock people now!" trope. I'm certainly not offended by these scenes, I just find them dull and unimportant in the grand scheme of the plot.

All that said, Roth's mastery of the English language is as apparent in this book as in most of his others. There are a few particularly clever parts that did warrant a chuckle from me. I know there is an audience out there for this book, as evidenced by the fact that it won the National Book Award and was short-listed for the Pulitzer, but that audience is not me. ( )

Sabbath’s Theater is a superbly written novel by Philip Roth. He brings to life a loathsome, usurious adult man – Sabbath; one of those true-to-life characters one would normally feel repelled by. Yet, somehow, Roth manages to elicit, from his reader, a misplaced passion for this failure of a man. By looking back at his life and times, growing up in the 1940’s during WWII, one understands the major life events that affected Sabbath and the lives of those closest to him. No one has a free pass to use ones’ life circumstances as an excuse for immoral or otherwise, bad behavior. However, Sabbath possesses an underlying humanity that causes the reader to feel pity and compassion for him. That is the success of Philip Roth’s creativity. He is a master writer with the immeasurable ability to take his readers to uncomfortable places, yet bring them comfort in doing so. ( )

Wow, just wow. This book is so audacious, transgressive, repugnant, funny and fascinating. It may be the best book written in the last twenty five years. It's the story of Mickey Sabbath, a failed puppetteer and aging hedonist. It's also a comment on modern psychology and the recovery movement, an elegy for the dead of World War II and a comment on the sexual mores of the nineties. Just an unbelieveably dense, layered book full of characters so alive that felt as if I were in another world while reading the book. ( )

Mickey is an aging sexual charismatic. As the novel begins the bell has sounded , and he's into the final round. He's never given any of that much thought : what will he do? Well apparently, not go gladly into that good night. A rich, funny, sad, painful, and thoughtful novel. The scenes with Mickey going to his wife's addiction clinic, and visiting with an elderly man from his childhood neighborhood, are incomparable. Not a morality play, but a grim rumination on true loss and despair, and the price you pay for feeding your ego and appetites at other's expense, while still waking up to face another day.
This is a novel about a man with a ceaseless, thoughtless, transgressive, destructive, sexual appetite, so sex is dealt with candidly. The author has deliberately created a protagonist most of us would loathe if we knew or met him. If you can't handle these things, don't read the novel. ( )

I had doubts about this book until I came to the second half and began to understand what kind of book Roth was writing. I now think the book probably deserves any book award anyone wants to give it. It's always hard on the reader when a first-person narrator (the prose dips in and out) isn't someone he's naturally sympathetic to, and it's even harder when that narrator wins the reader's sympathy when his guard is down. (Some reviewers on this site have been momentarily won over in this way, and now feel bad about it — a victory for the author.) In fact the reader is so deeply inside Mickey Sabbath's head, and so well placed to see what's driving him, that it becomes impossible to tell whether Sabbath's character is a "plausible exaggeration" or a "genuine type." Maybe with fuller life-histories, we'd see these sorts of people everywhere. The question is interesting because it reveals Roth's power as a writer; the answer is basically unimportant. What is important, to properly enjoy this book, is to understand what kind of person Sabbath is.

Some people are provocative and antagonistic simply because they want to be that way (or at least that's how it seems from the outside). But Sabbath is provocative and antagonistic as a kind of "by-product" to a fundamentally benign nature. He's not malicious; he doesn't have any real "hates" (his hatred of the Japanese is somewhat manufactured); he knows right from wrong. But he does have strong feelings about how the world ought to be, and in particular about how people ought to behave and treat one another and him especially. And most important, he has his own appetites to satisfy. For him, this is a very unfortunate blend of circumstances: he just doesn't get along. Scene after scene describes his failure to get along. He seems to have only two successes at getting along: among the beggars in NY, and with his lover.

There's a lot for the reader to take from these two successes. Most important: it isn't "selfishness" that makes Sabbath what he is. In the right places, with the right people, he is a well-adjusted, happy human being who gets along, compromises, and gives generously.

But most of the book is a succession of failures, brought on by a bad mix of Sabbath's nature and the world. How did Sabbath become this sort of person? Why the overwhelming vision about how the world ought to treat him and his appetites? It would spoil the plot to discuss this. Also, there are strong biographical cues — Sabbath's childhood in New Jersey for instance — that I don't feel I appreciate on one reading.

I've read a lot of Roth, most of it I think. This one is magic.