Sabbath's Theater [Hardcover]

"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.

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.