Sabbath's Theater
Philip Roth, 1995
Knopf Doubleday
464pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679772590
Summary
Winner of the National Book Award
Sabbath's Theater is a comic creation of epic proportions, and Mickey Sabbath is its gargantuan hero.
Once a scandalously inventive puppeteer, Sabbath at sixty-four is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous. But after the death of his long-time mistress—an erotic free spirit whose adulterous daring surpassed even his own—Sabbath embarks on a turbulent journey into his past.
Bereft and grieving, besieged by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him most, he contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 19, 1933
• Where—Newark, New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., Bucknell University; M.A., University of
Chicago
• Awards—the most awarded US writer—see below
• Currently—lives in Connecticut
After many years of teaching comparative literature—mostly at the University of Pennsylvania—Philip Roth retired from teaching as Distinguished Professor of Literature at Hunter College in 1992. Until 1989, he was general editor of the Penguin book series Writers from the Other Europe, which he inaugurated in 1974 and which introduced the work of Bruno Schultz and Milan Kundera to an American audience.
His lengthy interviews with foreign authors—among them Primo Levi, Ivan Klima, and Aharon Appelfeld—have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review. Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933 and has lived in Rome, London, Chicago, and New York. He now resides in Connecticut. (From the publisher.)
More
Philip Roth's long and celebrated career has been something of a thorn in the side of the writer. As it is for so many, fame has been the proverbial double-edged sword, bringing his trenchant tragic-comedies to a wide audience, but also making him a prisoner of expectations and perceptions. Still, since 1959, Roth has forged along, crafting gorgeous variations of the Great American Novel and producing, in addition, an autobiography (The Facts) and a non-fictional account of his father's death (Patrimony: A True Story).
Roth's novels have been oft characterized as "Jewish literature," a stifling distinction that irks Roth to no end. Having grown up in a Jewish household in a lower-middle-class sub-section of Newark, New Jersey, he is incessantly being asked where his seemingly autobiographical characters end and the author begins, another irritant for Roth. He approaches interviewers with an unsettling combination of stoicism, defensiveness, and black wit, qualities that are reflected in his work. For such a high-profile writer, Roth remains enigmatic, seeming to have laid his life out plainly in his writing, but refusing to specify who the real Philip Roth is.
Roth's debut Goodbye, Columbus instantly established him as a significant writer. This National Book Award winner was a curious compendium of a novella that explored class conflict and romantic relationships and five short stories. Here, fully formed in Roth's first outing, was his signature wit, his unflinching insightfulness, and his uncanny ability to satirize his character's situations while also presenting them with humanity. The only missing element of his early work was the outrageousness he would not begin to cultivate until his third full-length novel Portnoy's Complaint—an unquestionably daring and funny post-sexual revolution comedy that tipped Roth over the line from critically acclaimed writer to literary celebrity.
Even as Roth's personal relationships and his relationship to writing were severely shaken following the success of Portnoy's Complaint, he continued publishing outrageous novels in the vein of his commercial breakthrough. There was Our Gang, a parodic attack on the Nixon administration, and The Breast, a truly bizarre take on Kafka's Metamorphosis, and My Life as a Man, the pivotal novel that introduced Roth's literary alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman.
Zuckerman would soon be the subject of his very own series, which followed the writer's journey from aspiring young artist with lofty goals to a bestselling author, constantly bombarded by idiotic questions, to a man whose most important relationships have all but crumbled in the wake of his success. The Zuckerman Trilogy (The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, and The Counterlife) directly parallels Roth's career and unfolds with aching poignancy and unforgiving humor.
Zuckerman would later reemerge in another trilogy, although this time he would largely be relegated to the role of narrator. Roth's American Trilogy (I Married a Communist, the PEN/Faulkner Award winning The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America), shifts the focus to key moments in the history of late-20th–century American history.
In Everyman (2006), Roth reaches further back into history. Taking its name from a line of 15th-century English allegorical plays, Everyman is classic Roth—funny, tragic, and above all else, human. It is also yet another in a seemingly unbreakable line of critical favorites, praised by Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and The Library Journal.
In 2007's highly anticipated Exit Ghost, Roth returned Nathan Zuckerman to his native Manhattan for one final adventure, thus bringing to a rueful, satisfying conclusion one of the most acclaimed literary series of our day. While this may (or may not) be Zuckerman's swan song, it seems unlikely that we have seen the last Philip Roth. Long may he roar. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Literary Awards
Philip Roth is one of the most celebrated living American writers. Two of his works of fiction have won the National Book Award (Goodbye, Columbus; Sabbath's Theater); two others were finalists. Two have won National Book Critics Circle awards (Patrimony; Counterlife); again, another two were finalists. He has also won three PEN/Faulkner Awards (Operation Shylock, The Human Stain, and Everyman) and a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his 1997 novel, American Pastoral. In 2001, The Human Stain was awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year. In 2002, he was awarded the National Book Foundation's Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Literary critic Harold Bloom has named him as one of the four major American novelists still at work, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Cormac McCarthy. In May 2006, he was given the PEN/Nabokov Award, and in 2007 the first PEN/Saul Bellow Award — both for lifetime achievement.
The May 21, 2006 issue of the New York Times Book Review announced the results of a letter that was sent to what the publication described as "a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify 'the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years." Of the 22 books cited, six of Roth's novels were selected: American Pastoral, The Counterlife, Operation Shylock, Sabbath's Theater, The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America. The accompanying essay, written by critic A.O. Scott, stated, "If we had asked for the single best writer of fiction of the past 25 years, [Roth] would have won." ("More" and "Awards" from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Sabbath's Theater [is] Mr. Roth's longest and, in my judgment, richest, most rewarding novel.... Ever since Portnoy's Complaint, Mr. Roth has been pre-eminent as a literary stand-up comedian, and some of the routines in Sabbath's Theater show him in top form.... [However,] there is plenty of nastiness in this book, and certain readers will find it repellent, not funny at all. One of Sabbath's friends, his patience exhausted by Mickey's abusive behavior, calls it "the discredited male polemic's last gasp." There is something to this charge, and the novel is stronger for allowing readers to consider the hero in such terms, if they choose. But it would be a mistake to do so exclusively, for that would involve foreclosing on the sympathies we give to the outrageous Sabbath when, in a section of 60 pages, the heart of the novel and one of the great sequences in American fiction, he returns to the Jersey Shore of his boyhood.
William H. Pritchard - New York Times Book Review
The novel fails to open out into a larger comment on society or our shared experience of mortality: Sabbath remains such a willfully selfish character that his adventures become a kind of black hole, absorbing rather than emitting light. He does not grow or learn from Drenka's death or his other losses; he simply learns to reaffirm the narcissism that has informed his entire life. As a result, Sabbath cannot assume a tragic stature; he remains, merely, pathetic.
Michiko Yakutani - New York Times
This is Roth's twenty-first novel and displays all the Rothian concerns and stylistic quirks his readers have grown accustomed to, only more exaggerated. It is a long, long book, but it grows on you.—Bonnie Smothers
Booklist
Roth's National Book Award-winning novel is a hilarious, beautifully written spoof about an aging puppeteer who finds himself rudderless when the death of his mistress, Drenka, effectively removes the driving force of his life: sex. Mickey Sabbath, now resigned to preparing for his own death, toasts all of the formerly significant figures in his life, including his first wife, who walked out on him; his mother, who was consumed by the death of Mickey's older brother during the war; and the nubile Drenka, whose appeal for Mickey's sexual fealty shortly before her death falls upon deaf ears. David Dukes reads this rip-roaring tale with a sensitivity that complements Roth's well-wrought prose. Recommended for all serious fiction collections, but advise your patrons to listen with the car windows up and the volume down. —Mark Annichiarico.
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
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