The New Criterion

At the age of sixty-two, Philip Roth ought to have outgrown the role of enfant terrible, but he insists on giving it the old college try. His exhibitionism has a didactic streak. He’s flashing us for our own good. Although the slick promotional brochure for Sabbath’s Theater[1] pictures Roth looking distinguished and debonair, like a Dewar’s Profile of the man of letters at leisure, the message of the book itself is that this literary success still hosts a wild man within. His latest antihero and designated sinner, Mickey Sabbath, is a horny geezer with a white beard. “Ascetic Mickey Sabbath, at it still into his sixties. The Monk of Fucking. The Evangelist of Fornication.” Catching his estranged wife shacked up with a younger woman, he thumps his chest and roars like Tarzan the ape-man, shaking the entire house. A puppeteer in the Indecent Theater who missed his shot at the mainstream when he declined a job offer from Jim Henson ages ago (he ruefully notes that he “could have been inside Big Bird all these years”), Sabbath is a countercultural has-been hampered with arthritis—a condition symbolic not only of the artist no longer able to practice his craft but of the control freak losing his hold. Which doesn’t stop him from trying to manipulate the other characters through a series of malicious pranks and head games (such as the nasty and labored humiliation of his mistress’s husband). The herky-jerky movements of this book may be intended to mimic the way Sabbath regards the rest of humanity— as jangling marionettes—but Sabbath himself jumps and twitches from scene to scene as Roth, the master manipulator, jerks his strings. He’s jerking the reader around, too.

The storyline to Sabbath’s Theater is very simple. There isn’t any. It’s another personal-shambles novel from Roth, lashed along in his most garrulous, huffy, radio-blaring style. Loud aggravation has become his trademark. After the flamboyant excess of such early stories as “Defender of the Faith” and “The Conversion of the Jews,” Roth’s early novels Letting Go and When She Was Good slowly ground up yardage as he scrupulously recounted and inspected every domestic incident, analyzing his characters’ psychological morass down to the last grain. His couples seemed attached by bitter necessity; they stayed together for the sake of the groceries. The novels’ cramped integrity and hangdog realism was called “Dreiserian” by some, but where Dreiser’s novels were a long horizontal accumulative crawl through the wealth and corruptions of the metropolis (the city is a dangerous lure, lying on the horizon like a showgirl on a platter), Roth’s novels remained apartment-bound, agoraphobic. They seemed to take place on a single set.

His breakthrough came with Portnoy’s Complaint, where Roth, who enjoyed a private reputation as an excellent mimic, loosened up at the mike and delivered a spiel that channeled Kafkaesque angst through a Jewish son’s kvetch. The trauma of toilet training had found its poet laureate. In the novel’s most hilarious chapter, “Whacking Off,” his narrator masturbated like a machine-gunner. The urgencies of Alexander Portnoy’s condition exploded traditional structure. The book was rushed and episodic, the brick-shaped paragraphs of his early work giving way to a page detonated with italics, bold caps, and exclamation marks. A phenomenal best seller, Portnoy’s Complaint received the masterpiece treatment from reviewers (“a technical masterpiece,” hedged Christopher Lehmann-Haupt), who compared Roth to Céline, Rabelais, Swift, and, of course, Lenny Bruce. They saw the novel as a primal scream that cleared the air—“the story finally ties together with the epiphanous neatness of any patient’s last gestalt,” Josh Greenfield reported in The New York Times Book Review. A few dissenters cited it as a brilliant piece of opportunism. As the critic Marvin Mudrick speculated, “Some years ago Roth got tired of being the most promising underpaid American writer and plugged into Chase Manhattan with Portnoy’s Complaint, the first kosher pornographic novel.” Aside from a Pinteresque exercise (Deception) and a dutiful pair of memoirs (The Facts, Patrimony), Roth has maintained a scratchy prose and a touchy persona. To my taste, he rose to genius in My Life as a Man, the definitive take on male paranoia, then exploited his notoriety with the tiresome gamesmanship of the Nathan Zuckerman novels.

Roth once told the writer David Plante, “Updike and Bellow hold their flashlights out into the world, reveal the real world as it is now. I dig a hole and shine my flashlight into the hole.” Characteristically, then, the real world gets only a passing swipe in Sabbath’s Theater—its protagonist spurns even keeping up with current events: “The news was for people to talk about, and Sabbath, indifferent to the untransgressive run of normalized pursuits, did not wish to talk to people.” Roth does provide him with a hole to ponder, however. The black hole dominating this novel is the grave of Sabbath’s dead mistress, Drenka. A dark Croatian from the Dalmatian coast, Drenka spouts endearing malaprops (“beating a dead whore … let him eat his own medicine … I have a bone to grind with you … crime doesn’t pay off”—we’re supplied with an exhaustive list) and is as dirty-minded as Roth’s hero, no easy chore.

Of course, Drenka would have to be Eastern European to earn her wow status, for as any reader of Roth knows, his fictional American women are too pampered and uptight to give truly of themselves (such succubi are usually nutcases, e.g., “Monkey” in Portnoy); it takes a real woman to affirm the flesh, and Drenka is a real woman, a round woman, “her shape, at her heaviest, reminiscent of those clay figurines molded circa 2000 B.C., fat little dolls with big breasts and big thighs unearthed all the way from Europe down to Asia Minor and worshiped under a dozen different names as the great mother of the gods.” She’s all momma. When Sabbath licks her “uberous” breasts, he’s “pierced by the sharpest of longings for his late little mother.” Breaking Mary McCarthy’s indoor record in Intellectual Memoirs, Drenka satisfies four men in a single day. Sabbath is awed. “The boldness with which she went after them! The ardor and skill with which she aroused them! The delight she found in watching them jerk off!” The regiment rides at dawn! After Drenka dies of cancer, former lovers masturbate on her grave in tribute. Picking up a bouquet of flowers left behind, Sabbath gets sticky hands from the semen spattered on their stems; licking it from his fingers, he chants before the full moon, “I am Drenka! I am Drenka!” And you thought fabulism was dead.

Drenka the everloving earth-mother is a recognizable type in the Roth oeuvre. Roth’s women tend to fall into three categories: the implacable foe, inspired by Roth’s fury of a first wife, who died in a car crash in 1968; the nympho dynamo, who presides as the narrator’s number-one groupie; and the cultured pearl, modeled on Roth’s second wife, the actress Claire Bloom. (In The Professor of Desire, the classy helpmate is even named Claire.) Sabbath’s Theater features the implacable foe—Sabbath’s wife, Roseanna—and the nympho dynamo—Drenka—but not the cultured pearl, for reasons to be explained later. Female will and appetite are thus amply represented, without any of the softening, consoling effects of simple companionship. Here there’s no buffer zone between the baser instincts of Roth’s men and women. Since the novel adopts Sabbath’s perspective (it’s a third-person novel that reads as if it were written in the first), the result is a disproportionate emphasis on his lecherous outlook. He can only relate to women as bodies, and those bodies are going to seed:

Nothing quite touches Sabbath like these aging dishes with the promiscuous pasts and the pretty young daughters. Especially when they’ve still got it in them to laugh like this one. You see all they once were in that laugh. I am what’s left of the famous motel fucking—hang a medal on my drooping boobs… .

… or pickled in their own juices.

Whores. Played a leading role in my life. Always felt at home with whores. Particularly fond of whores. The stewlike stink of those oniony parts.

In a scene which recalls the ballplayer complaining about a woman’s vaginal odor in Roth’s The Great American Novel (“It stunk like somethin’ that’s been left out somewhere and turned green”), a cabdriver tells Sabbath a joke about a truckdriver who advises his wife to sleep with a skunk between her legs while he’s gone. “So she says to him, ‘What about the smell?’ And he says, ‘He’ll get used to it. I did.’ ”

The carnality of Sabbath’s Theater (involving threesomes, fancy dildos, phone sex, golden showers) rattles along like a boxcar of tainted meat. The frenzy into which Sabbath and Drenka plunge soon seems less a pleasurable tailspin than an extended bout of hysterics in which the bodies seem to hiccup. The sex is too stage-managed to be a turn-on. The panting gallop of the dialogue (“Oh! Oh! Oh! Mickey! Oh, my God! Ahh! Ahh! Ahh!”) has a desperate quality, as if Roth were trying to get himself excited. He’s writing neurotic erotica—neurotica.

To up the ante, to award Sabbath his devil horns, Roth has to contrive new outrages for this no-goodnik, such as forging a letter from his wife’s dead father in hell (a devastating parody of psychobabble and the funniest coup in the book), or rummaging through the drawers of an old friend’s daughter and trying to blackmail a pregnant cleaning woman. “If he slipped her the third fifty, would she just slide to her knees as easily as when she prayed? Interesting if she prayed and blew him at once. Happens a lot in Latin countries.” Of course, it’s only a matter of time before Sabbath gets his comeuppance, or at least a stern talking-to. Once the old friend, Norman by name, finds a pair of his daughter’s panties stashed in Sabbath’s pocket, he launches into a too-pat lecture which reads as if the ghost of Mr. Sammler’s Planet were wagging his finger at Mr. Self-Indulgence. “You live in the failure of this civilization. The investment of everything in eroticism. The final investment of everything in sex. And now you reap the lonely harvest. Erotic drunkenness, the only passionate life you can have.” Norman expands this bill of indictment:

“The walking panegyric for obscenity,” Norman said. “The inverted saint whose message is desecration. Isn’t it tiresome in 1994, this role of rebel-hero? What an odd time to be thinking of sex as rebellion. Are we back to Lawrence’s gamekeeper? At this late hour? To be out with that beard of yours, upholding the virtues of fetishism and voyeurism. To be out with that belly of yours, championing pornography and flying the flag of your prick. What a pathetic, outmoded old crank you are, Mickey Sabbath. The discredited male polemic’s last gasp. Even as the bloodiest of all centuries comes to an end, you’re out working day and night to create an erotic scandal. You fucking relic, Mickey! You fifties antique! Linda Lovelace is already light-years behind us, but you persist in quarreling with society as though Eisenhower is president!” But then, almost apologetically, he added, “The immensity of your isolation is horrifying. That’s all I really mean to say.”

It’s at moments like this that one realizes that the strength of a Roth novel, like that of a John Osborne play, depends on the rhetorical roll and spleen of the monologues, since there’s seldom any genuine dialogue or casual exchanges in Roth’s fiction, only speeches recited by the yard. Roth’s humor works one-way, too. It’s nearly always the fuming Roth spokesman who gets the laughs, while the other party functions as conscience, reality principle, scold. No matter how many times a Roth hero is told off, he’s soon back on his hobbyhorse. He has too much invested in his ongoing snit-fit to take advice at this late stage, and is too set in his ways to meet new people. Who needs people when you have all these problems to keep you company? Since Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth’s heroes have been one-note prima donnas, isolated from society in Roth’s force field of fame. (From his interviews, you draw the impression that Roth only relates to other writers.)

The novel takes a few rest stops of reminiscence as Mickey Sabbath pays a nostalgic call on his old neighborhood and meets some old colorful characters and opens the carton containing his dead brother Morty’s personal effects, all of which only serves to remind him what a louse he is. Morty, shot down during World War II at the age of twenty, is a reminder of his own lost innocence. In a moment meant to bring out the violins, Mickey wraps himself in Morty’s old forty-eight-star flag and weeps in the mist. Sabbath knows he isn’t someone who will be missed and mourned. He envisions his own tombstone:

Morris Sabbath
“Mickey”
Beloved Whoremonger, Seducer,
Sodomist, Abuser of Women,
Destroyer of Morals, Ensnarer of Youth,
Uxoricide,
Suicide
1929–1994

But even this self-indictment betokens an inflated ego. His suicide threat is an empty boast. As we learn in the book’s final paragraph, Sabbath can’t bring himself to take what Hemingway called the Big Out. “He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.”

Hate is an emotion that Roth holds dear. It stimulates him, keeps his mind humming, this militant spite. His misanthropy runs even deeper than his misogyny. It isn’t the disgust with the dumb herd seen in Céline and Wyndham Lewis; Roth’s contempt isn’t as gut-level or all-encompassing. His misanthropy expresses itself as a supersensitivity toward the petty infractions made against his acute spirit. Roth has said that every writer feels he is right, but few have acted as wronged as Roth (that’s why that tired pun “the gripes of Roth” persists—he’s his own grievance committee). The slyest triumph of Roth’s career is how he’s converted his righteousness into capital, depicting himself as embattled, maligned, misunderstood, while enjoying more favor than almost any American writer alive. His first book, Goodbye, Columbus, was praised by the elders—Bellow, Leslie Fiedler, Irving Howe, and Alfred Kazin—and won the National Book Award and The Paris Review’s Aga Khan award. He has won the National Book Critics Circle Award twice, for The Counterlife and Patrimony. Even satires, like his baseball burlesque The Great American Novel and his anti-Nixon lampoon Our Gang, had admirers.

Portnoy’s Complaint drew hostile attention, but Roth’s dismay smacked of bad faith. He wrote a novel intended to shock and offend, then was perturbed when some readers were shocked and offended. Roth seems to need to feed off of negative notices as an excuse to back himself into a corner and counterpunch. Where an Updike novel, for example, seems to drop out of its own special cloud, the latest Roth novel seems like a response to the reaction to the previous Roth. After Irving Howe published a reconsideration of Roth in Commentary which contained the lethal putdown that the cruellest thing one could do to Portnoy’s Complaint was read it twice, Howe was hung out to dry in The Anatomy Lesson. To Roth’s credit, his tirade against Howe is very funny and exact, especially when he tees off on the sentimentality of Howe’s immigrant saga World of Our Fathers.

The comedy is that the real visceral haters of the bourgeois Jews, with the real contempt for their everyday lives, are these complex intellectual giants. They loathe them, and don’t particularly care for the smell of the Jewish proletariat either. All of them are full of sympathy suddenly for the ghetto world of their traditional fathers now that the traditional fathers are filed for safekeeping in Beth Moses Memorial Park. When they were alive they wanted to strangle the immigrant bastards to death because they dared to think they could actually be of consequence without ever having read Proust past Swann’s Way. And the ghetto—what the ghetto saw of these guys was their heels: out, out, screaming for air, to write about great Jews like Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Dean Howells. But now … it’s where oh where’s the inspired orderliness of those good old Hebrew school days? Where the linoleum? Where’s Aunt Rose?

No individual seems to have lodged in Roth’s craw for this novel. The discontent seems more generally dispersed. According to an article in The New York Observer, Roth was depressed by the poor reception to his previous novel, Operation Shylock. The book was praised by some “name” critics (Kazin, Harold Bloom), it won the PEN/Faulkner Award, but sales were weak. His disappointment is understandable—the first two- thirds of Operation Shylock are a bold feat —but his behavior afterward seemed disproportionate. Roth broke up with Claire Bloom (her absence is so pronounced in Sabbath’s Theater, it’s as if she’s been banished), and changed publishers. Sabbath’s Theater is shot through with the attitude that Sabbath (and Roth) feels discarded and passé. “When I got written up in The Nation for taking a tit out on the street [an incident which Sabbath recounts at tedious length] I was their noble savage for a week. Today they’d excoriate my balls off for so much as thinking about it, but in those days that made me heroic to all right-thinking people. Dissenter. Maverick. Menace to society. Great.”

Now he’s lost his cachet as a novelty act, and his audience as well. I do and do for you people—and this is the thanks I get! The novel ends with a virtuoso finale as Sabbath attempts to baptize Drenka’s memory by urinating on her grave (a hosing as copious and enriched with significance as the epic pee Norman Mailer took in Armies of the Night), only to be caught in a police car’s spotlight: “… he was fixed in the spotlight as though he were alone among the tombstones to perform a one-man show, Sabbath star of the cemetery, vaudevillian to the ghosts, front-line entertainer to the troops of the dead. Sabbath bowed.” Then, like a vaudevillian, he’s dragged away from the scene—given the hook.

In Sabbath’s Theater, Sabbath is pissing on the past and making profane slapstick comedy out of his own mortal dread. Drenka’s grave is a doorway to Sabbath’s own grave, which doubles as Roth’s. Sabbath/Roth immerses himself in the complete syllabus of death literature, reading “book after book about death, graves, burial, cremation, funerals, funerary architecture, funeral inscriptions, about attitudes toward death over the centuries, and how-to books dating back to Marcus Aurelius about the art of dying.” Given Roth’s age and range of afflictions (in recent years alone, he’s suffered from bouts of depression, dependency on Halcion and Xanax, undergone a knee operation and a quintuple bypass), it’s natural that he himself would be death-haunted. (John Updike, born a year before Roth, sifts through the shadows in his recent collection The Afterlife.) And given the lurid coloring of Roth’s talent, it’s absurd to expect stoic reserve from him at the prospect of extinction, or a wholesome change of heart. For all its narrator’s ailments, Sabbath’s Theater possesses a haranguing energy that make younger writers like Richard Ford and Michael Chabon look as if they’re pulling plows. But the novel is so narrow in its obsessions, so petty and overwrought, that its author seems to be wringing himself dry, choking off his last drops of juice. His flashlight gets stuck in the hole. Yet it’s too early to consign Roth to the remainder bin. These days, sixty-two isn’t so old. He’s managed to stretch his midlife crisis this far. He may mature yet!

Notes
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1. Sabbath’s Theater, by Philip Roth; Houghton Mifflin, 451 pages, $24.95. Go back to the text.