Rating: 
Summary: There but for the grace of God...
Review: Wow. A tour de force. I had never read Philip Roth before, and was a little leery of starting with Sabbath's Theater. An acquaintance had mentioned it to me as something rather lurid. Up for anything, I gave it a go, and I am very glad I did.
Unlike Updike and Irving, Roth goes for the emotional jugular. No beating around the bush with him. He speaks for the lovable confused lecher in us all, the depraved, hungry, oh so human animal. Mickey Sabbath's love for his dead mistress was so truthful and poignant. He practically got aroused by anything in a skirt, and didn't care about the consequences. The bizarre sexual fetishes, his enormous love and preoccupation with the female form. God bless him. That's me and every honest guy I know. Thankfully Roth has no shame either. Sex and death. Sex and death. He tips his hat to Joyce a bit. I loved his play on Molly Bloom's soliloquy too, "and no I said no I will No." A great book. I'm not surprised at all that it won the National Book Award.
Rating:
Summary: "I am disorderly conduct."
Review: The incredible Philip Roth, who gets stronger and stronger as the years go by, plunges further down into the sewer than he's ever gone before to give us Mickey Sabbath, an anti-hero if ever there was one. Think of him as Falstaff and Milton's Satan mixed with some Marquis de Sade....a personality so large and so outrageous that the more adventurous readers may find themselves shelving their morality for a little while in order to more gleefully bask in the filth. Sabbath is a 65-year-old man living in the quaint New England town of Madamaska Falls. He is a retired puppeteer (a dirty puppeteer, of course, until arthritis sidelined him), and now he lives off of a wife who is a recovering alcoholic, and spends all his free time and energy chasing the outermost boundaries of sexuality with Drenka, the inn-keeper's wife, who is more than willing to follow him to those boundaries and even lead him past them. A string of tragedies sends Mickey into a whirlwind and brings back a flood of memories from his troubled but colorful past. The narrative intermingling of past and present is on full display and will be familiar to readers of Roth. Also, this is one of the rare Roth books that doesn't have a first-person narrator, but an omniscient voice (of course, Roth's voice). Sabbath, however, is such an overwhelming presence that he often hijacks the narrative and runs off with it, particularly at those times when he seems to be coming apart at the seams. Those who are quick to always correlate the man Roth with his main characters should ask themselves how he can be so adept at switching points-of-view so quickly and without warning, and without risk of confusion. The answer is, because he's a master. Sabbath makes like Poldy in "Ulysses" and goes into stream-of-consciousness mode, and if you can get past the filth, you'll be privy to a character with a very disturbed internal life, but with a very strict code of conduct--"for a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can't beat the nasty side of existence." But a lot of filth there is, and this book could definitely alienate more sensitive readers. It would be an understatement to say that this is the dirtiest book Philip Roth has ever written. It's probably closer to home to say that Roth in this book makes Henry Miller look like Jane Austen. A cosmos of depravity peppers the pages, climaxing (sorry) at the end of the novel in a flashback with Mickey and Drenka which will leave you yellow. Of Roth's more recent novels, this one moves at the surest pace, and finds the most nerve-racking balance between low comedy and high tragedy. Only "Operation Shylock", I think, gives it a run for its money, though I'm very much looking forward to his new one in October, "The Plot Against America."
There is profundity in the darkest, seediest corner and Mickey Sabbath desperately wants to grab hold of it. And Philip Roth lets you ride along for the fun at a safe distance.
Rating: 
Summary: Sex as a tedious obsession
Review: Mickey Sabbath is a cruel, cantankerous, racist, misogynist fiend, whose only purpose in life is to pursue the pleasures of the flesh--and he's proud of it. After 65 years of hedonistic living, he finds himself "wifeless, mistressless, penniless, vocationless, homeless." Much of his misanthropy was intensified by the premature disappearances of the three most important people in his life--his brother Morty, killed in combat during World War II; his first wife Nikki, who vanished into thin air (prompted, perhaps by Sabbath's philandering ways); and his insatiable mistress Drenka, who dies of cancer. "Something horrible is happening to Sabbath": hating the world that remains with him, he contemplates suicide and ceases to follow the random rules of civil society. Whether a reader will find Mickey Sabbath and his escapades humorous (and occasionally poignant) will depend on how funny one finds comedy that originates in obnoxious behavior. There are some brilliantly witty passages, such as when Sabbath wanders the East Village disguised as a bum and, during his panhandling foray, assails a Shakespeare-quoting subway passenger. Yet, much of the time, Sabbath seems too extreme in his hatred to be believable, and his embodiment as a swine whose motto may as well be "Erotic drunkenness, the only passionate life you can have" veers from literary parody to outright fantasy. Let's put aside the implausible gag that so many women find this physically unattractive, hygienically filthy, emotionally unstable lout somehow alluring. (This book does nothing to diminish the oft-voiced critique that Roth understands men at their worst quite well--and women not at all.) Sabbath's much-flaunted Jewishness or his previous career as a puppeteer seem beside the point as well. Instead, this novel comes down to sex. Nearly every reader has noted that, while explicit and often simply crude, the unremitting carnality is too "monotonous" or even "analytical" to be erotic. Roth wants us to imagine Sabbath as a sailor who ponders including "quotations from Shakespeare, Martin, and Montaigne" in a possible suicide note. Yet both Sabbath as character and Roth as narrator seem to know only two or three words for sexual acts or parts of the human anatomy that could be represented by countless expressions; when it comes to sex, language fails them and they sound like overeager frat-boys. (The dullness plummets to its nadir in an extended, unfunny footnote that replicates phone sex dialogue.) Entire sentences are repeated, nearly verbatim, from one libidinal description to the next--and sometimes within the same scene (I could provide a number of examples, but this is a family-accessible site). There's nothing really "salty" about this sailor. If Roth's intention is to numb the reader to Sabbath's gluttonous hedonism, then surely he succeeds: venery has never been so dreadfully boring. (This view will, of course, vary across generations; I suspect older male readers might find these passages titillating or perhaps humorous--or, more probably, offensive.) Roth seems to imagine licentious overindulgence as an amateurishly produced pornographic video set to "repeat" mode. What "Kill Bill" is to amputation, "Sabbath's Theater" is to sex--but at least Tarantino has enough sense to vary the camera angle and cinematographic technique from one scene to the next. The tedium of these episodes would be forgivable if they didn't comprise approximately half the novel. And it's too bad, because much of the rest of "Sabbath's Theater" lives up to Roth's reputation as a master satirist of American life--of our predilection for 12-step programs and our fascination with Loreena Bobbitt. As a whole, this novel (along with the equally moribund "Deception" and "Professor of Desire") shows Roth just spinning his wheels.
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.
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