Word: roth
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...much more. With Sabbath, Phillip Roth becomes heir to author, Frederick Exley, the champion of the drooling, masturbatory sage. It's no easy feat. You have to make these guys truly repellent, absolutely unapologetic and yet still eloquent and artful enough to win the reader...
...expected, here also is Roth the irreverent Jew, Assuring a concerned New York friend that, yes, he can find a bagel in New Hampshire, Sabbath says, "They're every-where. They're like guns...
...vodka in return for sexual favors (while, mind you, he is ostensibly visiting his wrecked second wife drying up in said clinic), he is sharp enough to describe both his target and his wife with a commited, if not exactly compassionate, eye. This unblinking veracity is the source of Roth's much lauded credibility...
...could read Sabbath's Theater as Roth's backlash, a Mamet-like refutation of P.C. feminism. But that would be missing the point. Roth never comes close to defending Sabbath. He only hopes to render the man--his "primal emotions and indecent language and careful, complex sentences"--in such high relief that, try as we might, we cannot despise him. When Sabbath is booted out of his puppetry professorship at a local college, Roth sees fit to include, as a foot-note, a lengthy transcript of the offending teacher-student phone sex episode. This is only Roth the provacateur, daring...
...lacks a certain resolution, the character of Sabbath makes spectacular progress in the 48 hours around which the story--like dart-a-cars set up in the dining room--swoops in its looping trajectory. Whether Sabbath, wronged and wronging, bitter and bold and mean can go on is unclear. Roth has corralled a teeming, obscene, dwindling life, and that is enough...