Word: sabbaths
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
Stereotypes--sophisticated, hi-fidelity stereotypes--are introduced, are belittled, and then skillfully revealed as vivid characters. We can see this in Sabbath's sexual escapades, which have a touch of the anthropological about them. Sabbath is shame-less enough to offer a girl in a detox clinic two quarts of 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...
...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...
...baggage who is trying to die. That he cannot is alternately comic and deeply poignant. He is a man with issues: his family splintered after his hero brother was shot down in World War II, he has run from two marriages, and the specter of sexual dysfunction plagues him. Sabbath is haphazardly confronting his past; he is putting his affairs in order...
Though the novel 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...