Word: sabbaths
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Sabbath's Theater demonstrates that Roth still has the power to shock and amaze, although it doesn't have the fresh manic energy of Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a novel that capitalized on the then popular literary subjects of Jewish Americans and psychoanalysis. The paganized, foul-tempered Mickey Sabbath is beyond all that. Some readers will find the material and language too scabrous for their taste. Others will have their own reasons to cry foul. Roth's old adversaries in the suburban Sanhedrin should have no beef: Mickey is not bad for the Jews; he is bad for everybody...
...origins of Sabbath's outrage lie scattered among his failures and stubborn refusal to understand why he is not loved and rewarded for his disorderly conduct. He once had a street act in New York City in which his magic fingers casually unbuttoned a young woman's blouse. The police failed to appreciate the artistry. He also missed the gravy train when he turned down a ground-floor offer from Muppets creator Jim Henson...
...Mickey Sabbath could have been Big Bird. Instead he is spending his closing years in rural Massachusetts nursing resentments and his ragged individualism. His sole and meager support comes from his wife Roseanna, an Alcoholics Anonymous member who nearly drank herself to death for typically Rothian reasons: "because of all that had not happened and because of all that had." Chief among them were Sabbath's neglect and his affair with Drenka Balich, the lusty wife of the local Croatian innkeeper...
Artistic license has expired on shtick like that, and further critical explication of the separate realms of fact and fiction can no longer insulate the comedy from the offense . But the sexual obsession and obscenities are intrinsic to Sabbath's exaggerated character as a dirty old man. There is much humor in what makes us uneasy, and Roth extracts it, as he has done for nearly 40 years, with a technique and verbal flair unmatched by his contemporaries. Sabbath the houseguest rummaging through a teenager's underwear drawer or attempting to seduce his host's wife is the sort...
...Sabbath is saved from slapstick by his desire to find relief and wisdom in his past. He comes closest in a conversation with a 100-year-old man who once delivered vegetables in Mickey's old neighborhood. Getting the spirit of the aged on paper has become something of a sub-specialty for Roth--notably in Patrimony, his tender and unsparing account of his father's life and death. The encounter between Sabbath and the centenarian is reminiscent of the earlier memoir...