of lust.”

Sex, for Sabbath, is the only consolation for a life otherwise shorn of meaningful attachments except for one grand love: his Croatian-born mistress Drenka, wife of the local innkeeper, with whom he played out all of his erotic fantasies for twelve years before she died of ovarian cancer. Drenka was his “genital mate,” his female counterpart in lechery, whom he taught to be joyously and voraciously promiscuous. Sabbath was delighted to hear of her lustiest feat: She managed to have sex with three lovers on a one-day trip to Boston, then, back at home, just before midnight, accommodated her husband to achieve a twenty-four-hour quartet. This made her, for the saluting Sabbath, “a woman of serious importance.” Their only disagreement occurred when Drenka astounded him by asking him to take a pledge of mutual sexual fidelity with her. He was offended: She self-righteously wished to suppress the satanic side of sex, thereby deforming his nature. After her death, he frequently visited her grave at night to masturbate there, and sometimes observed her other bereaved lovers paying her the same tribute.

The immediate action of the novel occurs after Drenka’s death, with Sabbath a desperate, derelict sixty-four-year-old. Sober Roseanna is now a faithful member of Alcoholics Anonymous and preparing to throw him out of their house and marriage; he beats her to the act by leaving her, driving to New York City to attend the funeral of an old friend, a suicide, and to confront his self-destructive past. Roth half- mockingly pushes a Lear parallel for Sabbath: He is “wifeless, mistressless, penniless, vocationless, homeless . . . and now, to top things off, on the run.” Both Lear and Sabbath are foolish, outcast, and battered old men, but while Lear rages against his wicked daughters in particular and justice in general, Sabbath can only rage against himself and compose a self-satirizing obituary that concludes, “Mr. Sabbath did nothing for Israel.” Roaming the subways of Manhattan on his way to the funeral, he recites passages from King Lear while panhandling, imagining Nikki as his abused Cordelia and a sweet young woman on the Lexington IRT as Nikki’s daughter. Sabbath now hates everyone, especially himself, and wants to die.

Not so fast. His old friend and former coproducer Norman Cowan, tanned from a tennis vacation—a saint of benevolence, both wealthy and generous—takes Sabbath into his humane Manhattan home. Such compassion is too much for Sabbath: All he knows is how to profane it. He masturbates while holding Norman’s daughter’s underwear and photograph, terrorizes the Hispanic cleaning woman while the Cowans are at work, and that night, at dinner, plays footsie with what he thinks are the unshod toes of Norman’s wife Michelle, a periodontist. It turns out that the foot belonged to Norman, but Sabbath is not to be dissuaded from seeking to seduce Michelle, declaring, “A world without adultery is unthinkable.” The next morning an outraged Norman evicts Sabbath after the daughter’s underpants are found in his pants pocket. While Norman tries to arrange hospitalization for Sabbath after he has fainted, Sabbath steals ten thousand-dollar bills from Michelle’s bedroom and drives away to New Jersey to buy himself a plot in the ravaged Jewish cemetery where his family is buried.

So begin the book’s final one hundred pages, and they are brilliantly sustained as Sabbath leaves Lear’s world for Hamlet’s. He strolls among the graves, greeting the tombstones of his parents, his aunts, and the heroic brother, Lieutenant Morton Sabbath. Roth devotes an entire page to the names of all the buried “beloveds.” Having made his funeral arrangements, Sabbath then visits the nearby home of his father’s surviving cousin Fish, one hundred years old, “a mere mist of a man,” a living death who recalls almost no one and nothing. Sabbath steals from the befuddled centenarian’s house a cardboard carton containing his brother’s personal belongings, which include a folded-up American flag. He takes the flag to the beach, unfurls it, wraps himself in it, and weeps for hours.

Partially redeemed but as unhappy as ever, Sabbath returns to Massachusetts to say farewell to the memory of Drenka and to kill himself. He composes a mock will, establishing a prize of five hundred dollars to be awarded annually to the college senior who has had sex with more male faculty members than her peers. Wrapped in his brother’s flag, he urinates a farewell on Drenka’s grave and is apprehended by her policeman son Matthew, who has read the scandalous diary his mother left behind. Expecting Matthew to murder him, Sabbath is disappointed to be released—and to find that he still wants to live.

What are readers to make of this complex, energetic, disturbing, and provocative novel? Some readers will find it scandalous. Mickey Sabbath is not only sexually compulsive but also nasty, foul-mouthed, self-deluded, and willfully selfish. His narcissism can be considered loathsome, his racism and misanthropy repellent. Norman calls him a “walking panegyric for obscenity” and an “inverted saint whose message is desecration.” Many will call him Homo invectus.

Nevertheless, Sabbath’s Theater is also splendidly written and rascally fun to read. Roth gives Sabbath a clowning, perversely confessional, and reckless flow of language in a narrative that moves from phallic exuberance to flashing, slashing wit to a doleful account of suffering and loss. Roth knows how to build a novel, from flashbacks to vivid fantasies, from wild humor to desperate defiance of the world.

Can such a text be tamed into a generic classification? That of the picaresque novel may fit, though not entirely well. Like Reynard the Fox, Lazarillo de Tormes, Falstaff, Moll Flanders, and Felix Krull, Mickey Sabbath is a rogue, a con man and thief who lives by his wits, plays roles guilefully, and is remarkably loquacious, at times eloquent. Also roguish is his sharp insight into responses that he can manipulate to his own advantage, and his shameless indifference to established ethical standards.

Yet the picaresque mode proves too shallow and conventional to contain so devilish a person as Sabbath. He is socially subversive beyond the edge of criminality, ruthlessly willing to violate the well-being of others. His intensity of commitment to sex above all else, his passion for anarchic disruption, makes him one of the most dangerous and excessive protagonists in contemporary fiction. Roth’s novel is also a profound account of the infidelity inherent in all flesh. When Norman tells Mickey that he is pathetically outmoded in his parade of his penis, an isolated relic of the 1950’s, Sabbath responds defiantly that isolation is preferable to civilization and its discontents. Never will he rest in peace.

Bibliography

Cooper, Alan. Philip Roth and the Jews. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. An excellent book that explores the range and depth of Roth’s work, including some juvenilia and lesser known works and Sabbath’s Theater. Cooper discusses the material in the context of the political, social, and literary climate surrounding each work.

Greenberg, R. M. “Transgression in the Fiction of Philip Roth.” Twentieth Century Literature 43, no. 4 (Winter, 1997): 487-506. Places Sabbath’s Theater in the context of Roth’s previous novels that deal with the protagonist’s transgressing against society. Sabbath is an absurd hero who, like his forbears, believes in nothing.

Kelleter, F. “Portrait of the Sexist as a Dying Man: Death, Ideology, and the Erotic in Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater.” Contemporary Literature 39, no. 2 (Summer, 1998): 262-302. Kelleter discusses the major themes of the novel, which he identifies as death, eros, and ideology. An excellent in-depth article.

Shatzky, Joel, and Michael Taub. Contemporary Jewish Novelists: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Good sourcebook for biographic and critical information on Roth, including critical information about Sabbath’s Theater.

Wisse, Ruth R. “Sex, Love, and Death.” Commentary, December, 1995, 61-65. Wisse notes that Sabbath is an autonomous character, unlike so many of Roth’s previous heroes. She points out several relationships between Roth’s work and Kafka’s and concludes that Roth’s work falls short of Kafka’s.

Wood, James. “My Death as a Man.” The New Republic, October 23, 1995, 33-39. Wood describes Sabbath’s Theater as a departure from Roth’s books that present the author in disguise. Sabbath is a character larger than life and a character unto himself.