Rating: 
Summary: A Gross, Calculated, Fascinating Insult
Review: No one else could have written this novel. Only Roth, with his instinct for the perverse combined with his matchless prose gifts, could have come up with the character of Mickey Sabbath, puppeteer and the ultimate dirty old man. In a weird way, this book anticipates the movie "Being John Malkovich" about another tormented puppeteer whom the world rejects because of his challenging, strangely beautiful (but obscene) art. Roth really shoves your face in the dirt here and asks: what is the value of this particular human life? The last line, one of the greatest in recent American literature, is a conception of what is useful for the artist (or anyone else) to survive that will leave you pondering. Someone once said that you had better learn to appreciate humiliation, because that is what life is made of. Can we transfigure, transform, transcend it? This book also features the longest comic footnote in American literature, even longer than the one in "Lake Wobegon Days" (although Garrison Keillor probably never dreamed of the stuff that Roth puts in his.) If you can take it, this is well worth your time.
Rating: 
Summary: Hated it but couldn't put it down...
Review: This is my second attempt at reading Philip Roth. The first was Goodbye, Columbus. I never finished that but this one I stuck with for the main reason that it won the National Book Award. However, I didn't enjoy reading this book either. Perhaps it is just Roth's style that I don't particularly like, though some of the things he wrote made me stop and take a pause to think them over. Sabbath and many of the other characters (for example: Drenka) I found to be too outrageous to be realistic. Maybe it's just me and my boring life, but has anyone ever met someone like Sabbath or Drenka?? I found this novel to be literary pornography. I couldn't identify with Sabbath at all though I am neither a "dirty old man" nor Jewish. Maybe there are in fact those who can identify. However, despite all of the reasons not to finish this book I finally accomplished this today. I did in the end enjoy the novel and find that the tragic Sabbath is still alive and lingering in my brain though I can't explain why. Sabbath is the epitome of an absurd character. This book left me feeling very depressed.
Rating:
Summary: Knocking at Death's Door
Review: This novel, in a funny and fatalistic way, deals with the question of death. It shows Mickey Sabbath's struggle to understand and accept death--something he just cannot do. Not his own. Not his brother's. Not his parents. Not his lover's. So how does he cope with it? How does he confront mortality? He tries to, but he cannot. He laments and grieves; and he spends a lifetime of being angry, enraged. He tries sex as a cure. But it doesn't work anymore than any other cure. In the end, death wins. As always.The book, despite its wonderful humor and writing, is too long. A good editor would have been useful. Rambles. Ambles. And scrambles. So how did it win a National Book Award? Good question. A novel to be read, though. A novel to be enjoyed. A novel that will make one feel and think. That's good.
Rating: 
Summary: Roth in rare form
Review: It is hard to know what to say about Sabbath's Theater. The 'hero', Mickey Sabbath is not a likeable or easily understood character. His approach to the other figures in the novel seems consistently hostile and predatory, yet we understand that such a facade masks a deep torment and an increasing fear of death. His preoccupation with sex (not unusual for a Roth character) is a way of affirming life in the face of his own aging and infirm existence. The story is slight and the real thrust of the 'plot', after an intitial setup, is the question of whether Sabbath will chose to live or take his own life. However ugly Mickey's behavior and words are, Roth gives us something wonderful in each paragraph. We might not love Mickey, but it is hard to read this book and not be moved, impressed, and generally wowed by Roth's abilities as a writer. Wonderful reading.
Rating: 
Summary: Embarrassing quasi-porn
Review: This book is an old-fashioned, "shock the middle-class" novel, circa 1962, but actually written in the mid-1990's. It is silly, overly serious, pompous, and tiresome - but I must admit that it has some great paragraphs here and there (the cemetery scene is wonderful). I read the book because Roth is taken seriously by people I respect, but after reading this I now question their judgement.
Rating:
Summary: Self-indulgent diatribe obfuscated by sexual titillation
Review: Philip Roth has an unfortunate penchant for long polemics to skewer his notions of "political correctness" using contrived caricatures. I can't believe the focus on this book's reviewers is that the sexual content is shocking; not for the squeamish; salacious, etc. That that should be a readers difficulty with the material. I beg to differ. Unrealistic polemic and narcissism is what offends me. Then, again, incredulous, to me, that it won a National Book Award. Even his phone sex is boring! More a manipulative attempt to show he wasn't being a sexual predator than to engage in mutual erotic, orgasmic fantasy. Though it seems to have titillated some of his male reviewers. His political "skewers", which most reviewers have found amusing are the only things which shock me.
They act so woodenly; arbitrary and clumsy. Roth is at times inciteful, compassionate and courageous; but here and in his later novels, he is overindulgent, filled with a rage that is really mean. A petty man with petty grievances, given magnification by grotesqueness. Very disappointing.
Rating:
Summary: i don't mind this
Review: Music ceases to be a cerebral construction and instead becomes a mainly physical experience if you stand within spitting of the front row of a 1000 piece steel orchestra, or actully put your head inside the base-bin of a fifteen foot high speaker. The rhythm and the base largely bypass your conciousness and just makes your muscles move, and the adrenalin flow. And so, similarly, Sabbaths Theatre manages to explode literature from the confines of ideas and into the realm of the immediately PHYSICAL. As well as being totally psycho-sexually terrifying, this is the is the most visceral and relentlessly blood curdling thing i ever read. This book causes some serious hormonal imbalances as it sets each and every chemical in the body raging into a situation of sheer EMERGENCY. One negative upshot of all of this physical and pschological panic is that PHILIP ROTH ACTUALLY GAVE ME PSORIASIS. But, you are purely addicted, and justify your next hit on the grounds that, yes, this really is an important insight into the state of 20th century, and beyond, western society, it's outrageous moralizing, sexual politics, and the structure of it's relationships. And in doing so your delicate identity becomes simply a site of repeated trauma. This is the 100% pure columbian of Literature. Sabbath's payload is the overwhelming sense that you are living your life as if a castrated dog, and that any kind of moral judgement applied to any kind sexual behaviour or impulse is inhumane. You will spend several weeks seeking sexuality-affirming experiences in some crazy-ass attempt at making your own life something approching AUTHENTIC. ALL OF THE TIME. your own second-hand Sabbath-styled rants will get delivered for the millionth time in your local bar, and your conversation skills will become the verbal equivalent of no holds barred XTREME boxing, or what ever it's called. The interesting thing is how well and sympathetically these ideas are recieved. Sabbath will take your own grievences about the numbing effect of living in civilisation, feed them through a 500 megawatt amplifier and spit them back in your face with uncompromisingly brutal and brilliant humour. A dangerous book for the over-impressionable. hilarious, unique and brilliant.
Rating:
Summary: Roth's strongest book
Review: The giant of American letters produces another master piece.
Rating:
Summary: Handle With Care
Review: Any praise for this novel -- and it deserves much praise -- requires a strong word of caution: much of this book is sexually explicit. That said, in my mind Sabbath's Theater is one of Roth's best -- third only to The Counterlife and Patrimony (both of which are very different from this one). It is also, weirdly enough (and sexual frankness aside) less of a typical Philip Roth book and more like a Saul Bellow book; a book that focuses intensely on one not very sympathetic person's life to raise questions about the way that all of us live. Sometimes funny, sometimes repulsive, sometimes gut-wrenchingly sad, the one thing that Sabbath has going for himself above all is the capability of being brutally honest. One man's id running wild may not be the prettiest picture you'll encounter in a book, but it sure is worth reminding ourselves that it is possible to opt out from conforming, albeit at great personal cost.
Rating:
Summary: Not his best, in my opinion
Review: To say that Sabbath's Theater is a great book is to do injustice to Pastoral, Communist, Stain, Counterlife, Shylock, Portnoy, ... For die hard fans (such as myself) only.
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