Word: sabbaths
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...than linear, sometimes obscene, clearly intelligent monologue, do not shuffle away immediately; you may be speaking to Phillip Roth, the bemedaled novelist. Just how long--and how carefully--you will listen is what interests this author. That is his schtick. Well, stick it out. With his twenty-first novel, Sabbath's Theater, Mr. Roth gives us Mickey Sabbath, an aging, disgraced, arthritic puppeteer limping, no reeling, towards death. Finally, he is a magnificent character in a compelling story, crashing backwards through all the hurt he has caused...
Roth has always examined the perverse. For those who have followed Roth's heroes from dysfunctional adolescence, Mickey Sabbath is the logical endpoint: a cruel, brilliant, hormonal misanthrope, heartless and soulful. By now, dysfunction seems too kind a word to describe the protagonist's modus operandi. What we have here is malfunction...
...Mickey Sabbath is a washed-up street performer--for a brief long-ago moment the darling of the New York agitprop scene, now self-exiled in New Hampshire, financially dependent upon his equally bitter second wife. With the death of his Croatian mistress, Sabbath loses the thread of his miserable life, and sets off on a micro-odyssey with no real object...
...hard to ignore the novelist Roth in the puppeteer Sabbath. As an author, he invites the comparison. While test-driving coffins, Roth creates Sabbath who is grotesque essentially because he is old. Granted, he is a hard-used, degenerate failure, unwilling or unable to relinquish the brutish virility that got him this far. He is that fairly innocuous, vaguely threatening monster: the lecher, the dirty...
...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...