Sabbath's Theater

Mickey Sabbath

Mickey Sabbath is, by any conventional measure, a terrible person. At 64 he is fired from his teaching position after a phone-sex scandal involving a student. His mistress of thirteen years, Drenka Balich, has just died. His first wife disappeared thirty years ago. His second wife is in AA and beyond his reach. He is considering whether to kill himself.

Roth’s novel — which won the 1995 National Book Award — is Sabbath’s attempt to choose between death and continuing. The novel is structured as a series of grief-saturated memories, confrontations, and obsessive returns to Drenka’s grave, where Sabbath mourns her in the most physical terms he can manage. It is simultaneously comedy and elegy.

The Novel’s Challenge

Sabbath’s Theater asks the reader to spend 451 pages in intimate proximity to a character who is difficult, often repugnant, and occasionally sublime. The challenge is intentional. Roth has said that he wanted to write about a man who refuses all the consolations — moral, spiritual, social — that culture offers the aging and the grieving.

The novel divides readers more sharply than almost anything else in Roth’s bibliography. Some find it his masterpiece; others find Sabbath’s misogyny an obstacle that the novel never adequately addresses. Both readings are in good faith.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Sabbath’s Theater apart: The grief is genuine and total — Drenka’s death haunts every page; Roth’s command of Sabbath’s voice is extraordinary throughout; and The novel’s willingness to follow its character into darkness without flinching is rare. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of Sabbath’s Theater give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Desire and grief are the same force expressed differently — Sabbath’s obsessive pursuit of women is inseparable from his inability to accept loss. The obscene is not the opposite of the serious but can be its vehicle. Aging is not a gentle process and American culture’s insistence that it be graceful is a form of dishonesty. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

Philip Roth’s prose in Sabbath’s Theater is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

Sabbath is designed to be difficult to like — some readers cannot get past his treatment of women. The novel’s attitude toward sex and death will alienate readers looking for conventional moral comfort. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Roth readers who want his most extreme and uncompromising novel, and readers interested in how fiction can use transgression as a mode of seriousness.

The National Book Award

Sabbath’s Theater was published in 1995 and won the National Book Award for Fiction the same year. It is the novel most critics consider Roth’s most transgressive and, by some accounts, his most completely achieved. Mickey Sabbath is sixty-four, a former puppeteer, a systematic sexual adventurer, a man of appetites that have not diminished with age and a rage at mortality that exceeds anything Roth had previously given a protagonist. The novel’s energy derives from Sabbath’s determination to remain fully present to his desires while knowing that he is dying — not from any specific illness but from the passage of time, which he experiences as an assault.

Roth’s Most Extreme Protagonist

Sabbath differs from Roth’s other major protagonists — Zuckerman, Kepesh, Swede Levov, Coleman Silk — in being incapable of the detachment that those figures use to observe their own behaviour. Sabbath is entirely occupied by himself, and this total self-occupation, which would be pathological in a realistic novel, functions in Sabbath’s Theater as a formal principle: the novel’s comedy and its grief are both generated by a character who has refused the accommodations that make ordinary social life possible. The novel was dedicated to Roth’s father, Herman Roth, who had died in 1989. The dedication is one of the stranger choices in his work: a novel this uncompromised in its darkness, offered to a parent’s memory.

Drenka and the Grief

What drives the novel and gives it its emotional weight beneath the obscenity is Sabbath’s grief for Drenka Balich — his Croatian-born mistress of thirteen years, who died of ovarian cancer. The grief is total and refuses all consolation. Sabbath returns to her grave, speaks to her, rages at her absence with the same intensity he brought to their affair. He cannot mourn decorously because he cannot be decorous about anything, and his refusal to observe the social forms of grief — to accept that the living must eventually resume their lives — is both the novel’s comedy and its most honest recognition. Loss, Roth insists through Sabbath, does not diminish to a manageable size. It is the size it is, and Sabbath is one of the few Roth protagonists unwilling to pretend otherwise.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.2/5 — Roth’s most extreme novel and, in some respects, his most honest one. The National Book Award winner is also the most likely to lose readers who find Sabbath unbearable — which is partly the point.