Sabbath’s Theater
By Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin, 451 pages, $24.95
By now most every one of the words rooted in stepping–aggressive, regressive, progressive–have been pasted onto Philip Roth. Transgressive, though, as we’re thoroughly reminded by Roth’s overwhelming new novel, is the one he seems happiest to let stick. The Apollonian cunning of Roth’s classic Zuckerman trilogy and “The Counterlife”–maybe the most European of contemporary American novels–has relaxed, only to be replaced by the Dionysian fury and sexual frenzy at the margins of taste of “My Life as a Man,” “Portnoy’s Complaint” and “Our Gang.” Back on center stage in this new novel is outrageousness that sounds like offensive comedy, that tastes like sex and that stinks like death.
We are back to being focused upon a naughty, even bad man, one who’s awash in the hormone preposterone. Sixty-four-year-old Morris “Mickey” Sabbath, a startlingly original puppeteer trained in Italy who’d begun his career performing on the streets of New York (and being arrested for obscenity when he’d get young coeds to take off their shirts for the fingerpuppets), is a man “who wanted to do what he wanted to do.” Chief of his talents is that “of a ruined man for recklessness, of a saboteur for subversion, even the talent of a lunatic–or a simulated lunatic–to overawe and horrify ordinary people.”
Sabbath would have been the original Big Bird had he agreed to Jim Henson’s offer to don the costume, but he turned Henson down. This was one of merely a number of stabilities Sabbath spends a life trashing. His first wife, Nikki, the star of his Lower East Side theater troupe, vanishes (every once in a while thereafter he will tell people–casually, equably, falsely–that he killed her). After that he leaves New York for New England, now with his second wife Roseanna, who becomes a teacher, an ignored spouse and a desperate Chardonnay-hound in the little town of Madamaska Falls. In the meantime Sabbath, his hands being crippled with arthritis and living off his wife’s paycheck, turns into a version of the short, chunky satyr of Picasso’s late drawings. The most substantial of the nymphs he gambols with is Drenka, the fiftyish, insatiable, joyously sexual wife of a local Croatian-immigrant innkeeper. But there have been various female undergraduates from the local college as well, Sabbath’s life having been “an existence whose waywardness constituted its only authority and provided its primary amusement.”
Adultery and manipulation are oxygen to him. Yet by Drenka’s sudden death from cancer and Roseanna’s recovery from drinking–plus the grand guignol of a public shaming when he is dismissed from a college adjunctship after the student he sleeps with lets out the tape she made of their phone-sex–by all this Sabbath finally has been beached. Appearing near his head lately has come the ghost of his “little mother,” a woman who had lingered dead-in-life in a state of solid depression after Sabbath’s older brother Morty was killed in the Pacific in World War II.
And when one of his staunchest supporters kills himself, half of the pair of producers who’d long ago run his theater, Sabbath leaves Madamaska Falls for New York and the funeral–as much to see what a suicide looks like as to pay his respects. For now, with so much less life around him to gnaw against, insult and hate, Sabbath can only think to try self-destruction on for size. Reality seems to have come to an agreement that there was nothing more right that Sabbath could do than die.
This book of rock-bottom breakdown and equally fierce salvage thus is Sabbath’s rehearsal. The stations of his cross are wildly unstable. Coming to the city, he lays up at the home of his other old producer, Norman Cowan. The Cowans can see Sabbath is near collapse, yet their concern and protection is repaid by Mickey’s stealing of various intimate items from their dresser drawers. The next day finds Sabbath half-consciously begging with a paper cup on the subway. After that he goes to arrange for a burial plot for himself, following which he retreats to the Jersey shore to do himself in. How finally he is saved from this fate is as fluorescent as the manner he courted it.
A guarantee: In the ultra-careful, politically and sexually correct ways of the current world, not everyone will be amused by Sabbath, this randy Portnoy who has aged in brine, the man who “did not care to make people suffer beyond the point that he wanted them to suffer; he certainly didn’t want to make them suffer any more than made him happy. Nor was he ever dishonest more than was pleasant. In this regard, at least, he was much like others.”
He recounts the crudest jokes. He hates the Japanese. He is withering about A.A., the recovery movement, mental illness. Often Sabbath is elaborately and actively cruel. He sets up Drenka’s husband to make a fiasco out of a Rotarian speech; on a visit to the substance-abuse treatment hospital where Roseanna dries out, he secretly reads her diary about her father’s psychological abuse and himself writes a reply on a blank page of it signed “your father in Hell.” He plays with his hostess’ foot under the table (actually it turns out to be the host’s) when she is trying to save his life. He lies, he toys, he turns all affection and trust toward him into a mockery. He is faster, glibber and smoother than he has any need to be–he’s his own demon.
But if Roth naturally stacks the deck with Sabbath’s transgressions, it would be sinful not to notice how remarkably he treats those who are tumbled in its wash, the people Sabbath pummels. Extracted from this witch’s sabbath of a book is a peculiar tenderness that would not be obtained from unchallenged benevolence. It’s conventional to call Roth and his keystone characters self-centered–but the fact is that other people live in his books more abundantly than in those of most American writers past and present. Sabbath may himself have no dignity–Roth novels abjure such a quality for their protagonists–but that only leaves that much more of it for the other characters.
Extremity being the music Roth always hears best, there are at least three great symphonic conversations in the book: Sabbath with Norman Cowan, his ex-producer, on the night he leaves Roseanna; Sabbath with a young female patient at the same hospital Rosie’s in; and, near the end, Sabbath with his 100-year-old cousin Fish at the Jersey Shore, a relic who doesn’t know who Sabbath quite is but accepts him with grace into the economy of an old man’s existence (“It’s time to put up my lamb chop. I make a lamb chop. . . . I put it in the oven. Takes about ten, fifteen minutes and it’s done. Sure. I got Delicious apples. I put in an apple to bake. So that’s my dessert. And then I have an orange.”) In all these exchanges a truth is established indelibly only because it’s being simultaneously resisted.
Not everything in the book works as well. A flashback to the first wife’s morbid stewardship over her mother’s corpse is flabby and flogged; Sabbath’s longtime mistress Drenka comes off more idealized as a goddess of erotic gaiety than operatively believable. (Her husband, oddly, enough–a very Rothian oddness–is more human to us in a scene when Sabbath approaches him with breathtaking guile after Drenka’s death.) But in a book as skinless as this one is, lapses and repetitions don’t seriously crease the whole. Roth is never less than alert to himself–it’s something a little different than self-consciousness–and this lends a sense of speed to situations and comebacks in dialogue that otherwise might take up whole scenes to develop. Some Roth sentences have the chewiness and rubbery recoil of jokes; others own a gravity that comes up between the toes. If lyricism means a satisfaction with the sensitive self, Roth never has been a lyrical novelist; it’s the wounded self that wounds in turn, in cockeyed sympathy even, that is the lyre instead .
“What’s laughable,” Roth once wrote about Milan Kundera, “is how terribly little there is to laugh at with any joy”–and of course that last, best laugh here is ultimately death’s: “the absence of a presence can crush the strongest people.” When Drenka in the end, after her demise, is discovered to have been a diary keeper, a book writer, a legacy maker–as though to say that all books are damnably necessary and also necessarily too late–this has more than mere plot significance. Death oversteps limits with a giddy profundity that makes Sabbath’s misdemeanors seem like chicken feed in comparison. And so from this fiercest of books drips a steady, clear humility:
“The goofiness you must get yourself into to get where you have to go, the extent of the mistakes you are required to make! If they told you beforehand about all the mistakes, you’d say no, I can’t do it, you’ll have to get someone else, I’m too smart to make all those mistakes. And they would tell you, we have faith, don’t worry, and you would say no, no way, you need a much bigger schmuck than me, but they repeat that they have faith that you are the one, that you will evolve into a colossal schmuck more conscientiously than you can possibly imagine, you will make mistakes on a scale you can’t even dream of now–because there is no other way to reach the end.”
It’s this kind of fatalism that steadies “Sabbath’s Theater” like a bull’s-eye, a perversely generous determinism out of the bloodlines of Hardy, Verga, Naipaul, Fellini: lively and deathly, snarling and really quite spectacular.
