by Philip Roth
Book review by Doron Weber
On the last page of Sabbath's Theater, Philip Roth's 21st book and
arguably his finest novel, the obscene protagonist Morris "Mickey"
Sabbath pleads for death. A self-described "whoremonger, seducer, sodomist,
abuser of women, destroyer of morals, ensnarer of youth," Sabbath knows he
has violated every code of decency. With the premature death of a beloved
mistress, Drenka, the unhappily married 64-year-old failed puppeteer seems to
have little left to live for. In fact, for close to 450 pages, Sabbath has been
planning his own demise. Now he hopes that Drenka's furious son, a state trooper
named Mathew who has caught him desecrating her grave, will finish him off. When
Mathew refuses, Sabbath tries to end his ordeal, and the novel, by killing
himself: "And he couldn' t do it. He could not fucking die. How could he
leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here."
It is a tribute to the perverse vitality of Philip Roth's latest creation that
this ending seems right. Sabbath is ironically doomed to live, chained to his
own pathological sexuality, too full of low, loathful life to die. He is an
excessive character but his excess is stamped with authority. The authority
comes from the ebullient Roth, who has finally created a fictional protagonist outside
of himself to whom he can devote his sustained imaginative attention. Though
Roth has not totally abandoned the subterfuges of self-conscious
autobiography--there are several teasing parallels and a profound affinity with
his character--he has transcended them by inventing a larger, richer universe
which can absorb (and transmute) his merely personal concerns. Put otherwise,
for the first time in several decades, Philip Roth has written a book in which
neither Philip Roth and his post-Portnoy literary career, nor Roth's
thinly-veiled stand-in, the author Nathan Zuckerman, makes an appearance. The
sense of relief is enormous.
Roth's relief, and literary release, seems palpable too, as if letting go of his
own overt biography has freed his imagination and unleashed a new zest for
fictional exploration. Sabbath's Theater may be, in fact, one of those
books that forces us to reappraise its author's career. Despite several bold,
self-reflective, intermittently brilliant forays into literary experimentation
during the past 25 years (The Ghost Writer, The Counterlife, and
that ingenious failure Operation Shylock), and some outright clunkers (The
Professor of Desire, Deceptions), Roth's most satisfying work has
been the affecting but nonfiction Patrimony, a slim memoir of his
father's death. Ironically, it is Roth's fiction that has seemed too
narrow and self-confined, even as it took on "big" ideas--until Sabbath's
Theater, which feels like his first completely successful synthesis of so
many previous concerns.
The basic theme of the novel is hardly new. A lecherous, unconventional old man
rages against the passage of time and the dwindling of potency by which he has
defined his existence. But this theme is handled with more lyrical energy,
greater sexual frankness, and, simultaneously, sharper comedy and deeper
seriousness than usual: the mad, abiding human need for sexual contact in any
form, and the necessity to arrange, or derange, one's life to accommodate this
most basic drive; the unbridgeable gap between appetite and conscience; the cost
of true rebellion and nonconformity; marriage and adultery; aging and desire;
suicide; and death. Add to this list the other Rothian staples--being a Jew in
modern-day America, being a man in a feminist world, being an artist in
bourgeois society--and you have the basic, tangy ingredients.
Though there is a deft use of flashback and association, the story moves forward
at a brisk pace. When his beloved, promiscuous mistress dies, the grieving
Sabbath leaves his recovering-alcoholic wife--who hates but supports him--and
sets off a on a wild voyage to his past that combines genuine soul-searching
with "hell-bent-for-disaster erotomania." These events are filtered
through the mind and actions of a genuine literary rogue and scoundrel, a
charming, outrageous, manipulative character whose influences include Chaucer,
Rabelais, Shakespeare, Yeats, Joyce, Miller and Joyce Carey of "The Horse's
Mouth". (On another level, the comic-strip exaggerations and phallic
obsessiveness recall the art of R. Crumb).
Sabbath is the self-proclaimed "Monk of Fucking, the Evangelist of
Fornication." From the age of 17, when he ran off to sea so he could visit
every whorehouse in the world, his life has been singlemindedly devoted to the
pleasures of the flesh.
The core of seduction is persistence. Persistence, the Jesuit ideal. Eighty
percent of women will yield if the pressure is persistent. You must
devote yourself to fucking the way a monk devotes himself to God. Most men have
to fit fucking in around the edges of what they define as the more pressing
concerns: the pursuit of money, power, politics, fashion, Christ knows what it
might be -- skiing. But Sabbath had simplified his life and fit the other
concerns in around fucking.
Sabbath's philosophy is to do whatever he wants and not to worry about pleasing
anyone. During the 1950s he becomes a puppeteer performing in front of Columbia
University and establishes the Indecent Theater of Manhattan before he is busted
on obscenity charges for coaxing a women's breast out of her blouse. Sabbath is
undaunted. He takes particular pleasure in his ability to antagonize people, as
if only by measuring their outrage can he gain an adequate reflection of
himself. He manages to hurt, deceive, betray, lie, steal, offend, insult, and
abuse just about everyone he meets: both of his wives; his mistress (even though
he loves her); his host and loyal former friend, whose wife, daughter and maid
he exploits in varying degrees; his 21-year-old student, even if she gives as
good as she gets, leaving behind a steamy tape of their phone sex encounter
which is promptly bootlegged and made available on an 800 number.
But though Sabbath is truly "loathesome, degenerate and gross," he is
also a sentient creature with a moral consciousness. An almost idyllic childhood
on the Jersey shore is shattered by the death of his beloved older brother,
Morty. After Morty's plane is shot down over the Philipines during World War II,
Sabbath's mother goes into a catatonic state. The hitherto close family is
destroyed and Sabbath feels as if he too is dead: "The living son she
ceased to recognize." This traumatic dual loss helps explain Sabbath's
selfish, carnal world view: since life is so brutally unfair and
incomprehensible, why not live for the pleasures of the moment and the flesh,
the only reliable realities? Sex is life and Sabbath is fully, crassly, and
unapologetically alive.
Yet even as he indulges his every sexual impulse--and casts a withering,
satirical eye on those less in touch with their sensual natures--Sabbath does
not give up trying to understand the deeper mysteries of life. Why did his
brother have to die? Why did his mother turn her back on life? And why does he
feel the pain and sadness that increasingly overcome him? "This is human
life," the omnipresent ghost of his mother tells him, "There is a
great hurt that everyone has to endure." The novel derives much of its
comic pathos from this tension between Sabbath's low-life existence--he and Roth
revel in his incorrigible lechery--and his yearning for higher illumination:
Lately when Sabbath suckled at Drenka's uberous breasts--uberous, the root word
of exuberant, which is itself ex plus uberare, to be fruitful, to
overflow like Venus lying prone on Tintoretto's painting where the Milky Way is
coming out of her tit--suckled with an unrelenting frenzy that caused Drenka to
roll her head ecstatically back and forth and to groan (as Venus herself may
have once groaned), "I feel it deep down in my cunt," he was pierced
by the sharpest of longings for his late little mother.
Such stylistic virtuosity can become sterile when marshalled for sheer effect,
as in some of Roth's recent work. But here it is largely effective because it
advances our understanding of individual characters embedded in real conflict.
To be sure, Roth is better at conjuring the raunchy, or the morally ambivalent,
than the purely solemn: Morty, for example, is less convincing as a character
because he is too good to be true, while Sabbath's despair is less credible than
his rage, confusion, or duplicitousness. Still, this novel contains some of the
funniest--and finest--writing in English today.
Sabbath seems partially redeemed by an awareness of his situation, which gives
him a comic, Lear-like grandeur when he hits bottom panhandling on the New York
City subway. And for all his mischief-making and manipulation, he does not
really take anyone in. As his tolerant, upper-middle class producer friend,
Norman--who, along with his attractive, menopause-battling, dentist wife
Michelle, is among the best-drawn characters in a novel rich in
portraiture--says:
Isn't it tiresome in 1994, this role of rebel-hero? What an odd time to be
thinking of sex as rebellion. Are we back to Lawrence's gamekeeper? At this late
hour? To be out with that beard of yours, upholding the virtues of fetishism and
voyeurism. To be out with that belly of yours, championing pornography and
flying the flag of your prick. What a pathetic, outmoded old crank you are,
Mickey Sabbath.
Towards the end, as he battles the impulse to kill himself ("wifeless,
mistressless, penniless, vocationless, homeless"), Sabbath appears to find
something he can affirm besides his prick: he goes to a seedy cemetery where his
family is buried and chooses a burial plot for himself; he finds a 100-year-old
man from his childhood, Cousin Fish, still alive; he discovers cherished
mementoes from his dead brother. But a final effort at reconciliation with his
wife turns into broad farce. Sabbath's fate is to remain outside, a disruptive
life force, like some exiled Jack-in-the-box.
Sabbath's Theater is a signal achievement, crackling with more energy
than any of Roth's creations since Portnoys' Complaint. And his latest
work is peopled with a greater variety of characters and life experience, a more
sophisticated narrative, wider tonal range, and a more complex, fully-realized
protagonist than that brilliant, hysterically funny but essentially one-note
monologue. But whether Sabbath's Theater will win Roth back a mass
popular audience is less certain. Portnoy was a landmark in its frank treatment
of ethnicity and sex--most notably masturbation, shikses, and Jewish
mothers--and in its comic depiction of painful repression. It broke the taboos
of its time, for all time.
Sabbath's Theater is equally graphic in sexual terms, and equally,
hilariously iconoclastic: masturbation, while still big, has been superseded by
the "golden shower." But this form of sexual exchange may prove too
perverse to elicit the same howls of recognition and sympathy from the average
reader. Especially since, unlike the farcical liver scene in Portnoy, the
ever-subversive Roth treats two aging lovers pissing on each other as a tender,
emotional climax, an act of love he wants the reader to understand and share.
Here is Sabbath listening to his dying Croatian mistress in the hospital.
"I felt that, I felt that--you were totally with me then. In all senses, as
I was lying there afterward in the stream, holding you in the stream, in all
senses, not just as my lover, as my friend, as someone, you know, when you are
sick I can help you and as my total blood brother. . . . It's so forbidden and
yet it has the most innocent meaning of anything."
"Yes," he said, looking at her dying, "how innocent it is."
Not everyone will be able to stay with this scene, particularly as it is
preceded by a precise and vivid two-page description of excretory exactitude.
Or, conversely, it may simply be that the world of 1995 is already too jaded and
shell-shocked even to care about such "innocent" scatology. In either
case, Roth has foreseen and incorporated both responses into his capacious,
multi-tiered book, a striking and original work which shows a major American
novelist renewing himself with a darkly complex, comic masterpiece.
Reprinted from the Boston Review 1995
