Sabbath's Theater
by Philip Roth | Literature & Fiction | This book has not been rated.
ISBN: 0395739829 Global Overview for this book
ISBN: 0395739829 Global Overview for this book
3 journalers for this copy...
The central character of the novel, Mickey Sabbath, is a sixty-four-year-old forced into retirement because of arthritis. Most of the narrative is a gleeful recounting of Mickey’s many infidelities, and even his grief at the death of his latest mistress is motivated more by anxieties about his failing powers of seduction than by any romantic longing. The unsuspecting reader should be aware that the theater of the novel’s title refers to Mickey’s pioneering puppet act from the 1960s that was performed by his middle finger — while his other fingers deftly set about disrobing female members of the audience.
Roth offers a series of vignettes that are occasionally knowingly calculated enough to test the reader’s sympathy to the limit. There is no profanity, it seems, that is too awful for Mickey Sabbath to contemplate: he plunders the underwear drawer of his best friend’s daughter in search of an aid to masturbation, he sneers at his wife’s attempts to combat alcoholism, and he urinates upon the grave of a former mistress.
Lechery, it seems, is Mickey’s vocation in life, and Roth is blithely indifferent to the agenda of political correctness. The novel is often darkly comic, and the carnivalesque energies that it unleashes do sometimes make Mickey uncomfortably engaging. For those in search of the vicarious thrills of cocking a snook at bourgeois morality, this novel will certainly not disappoint. — Vance Adair in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die
Roth offers a series of vignettes that are occasionally knowingly calculated enough to test the reader’s sympathy to the limit. There is no profanity, it seems, that is too awful for Mickey Sabbath to contemplate: he plunders the underwear drawer of his best friend’s daughter in search of an aid to masturbation, he sneers at his wife’s attempts to combat alcoholism, and he urinates upon the grave of a former mistress.
Lechery, it seems, is Mickey’s vocation in life, and Roth is blithely indifferent to the agenda of political correctness. The novel is often darkly comic, and the carnivalesque energies that it unleashes do sometimes make Mickey uncomfortably engaging. For those in search of the vicarious thrills of cocking a snook at bourgeois morality, this novel will certainly not disappoint. — Vance Adair in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die
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