Recent Reading: Sabbath's Theater

Today I finished reading Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater and I am having a hard time deciding what I think about the book. 

Perhaps the way to start is with a brief plot summary. In short, the book is about 60 year old Mickey Sabbath a disgraced former puppeteer who spends his day reflecting on sex and death. OK. I suppose that is accurate, but that does not quite capture it.

Here is what I believe is the publisher's summary from the goodreads page:

He is relentlessly defiant. He is exceedingly libidinous. His appetite for the outrageous is insatiable. He is Mickey Sabbath, the aging, raging powerhouse whose savage effrontery and mocking audacity are at the heart of Philip Roth's astonishing new novel. Sabbath's Theater tells Mickey's story in the wake of the death of his mistress, an erotic free spirit whose adulterous daring exceeds even his own. Once a scandalously inventive puppeteer, Mickey is now in his mid-sixties and besieged by ghosts - of his mother, his beloved brother, his vanished first wife, his mistress of thirteen years. Bereft and grieving, he embarks on a turbulent journey back into his past, one that brings him to the brink of madness and extinction. But no matter how ardently he courts death, he is too exuberantly alive to succeed at dying. Sabbath's Theater is a comic creation of epic proportions, and Mickey Sabbath is its gargantuan hero.

The book won the National book award, and I learned from reading Blake Bailey's recent biography of Roth that Sabbath's Theater was Roth's favorite book. But not everyone was impressed. Consider what Michiko Kakutani said about the book in the times:

There is a fundamental difference, however, between Sabbath and Portnoy: while Portnoy, at 33, feels horribly conflicted between his "strongly felt ethical and altruistic impulses" and his yearnings to rebel, Sabbath seems to have had no problem spending his 64 years here on earth "marshaling the antipathy of just about everyone." Portnoy tries to embrace sex and bad behavior as a means of throwing off the repressive morality of his childhood; it's a way for him to assert his identity as a man. Sabbath, in contrast, pursues sex and subversion out of weary habit and selfish desire. Whereas Portnoy's attacks of conscience coupled with his rage to revolt gave that novel an exuberant comic energy, Sabbath's plodding pursuit of defiance lends "Sabbath's Theater" a static and claustrophobic air, resulting in a novel that's sour instead of manic, nasty instead of funny, lugubrious instead of liberating.

Kakutani was in disagreement with some other prominent critics. Harold Bloom and Frank Kermode called the book a materpiece. In her book length study of Roth's work, Claudia Roth Pierpont (no relation) agrees with Bloom and Kermode:

Sabbath's Theater is Roth's most emotionally intense book, a book that seems to be running a fever. It is also a masterpiece of twentieth-century American literature: coursing with life, dense with character and wisdom, it gives the deepest experiences we face -- dying, remembering, holding on to each other -- the startling impact of first knowledge, first incredulous awareness. Roth accomplishes this largely by avoiding expectations. Sabbath's Theater is deliberately abrasive and insanely funny -- even more than Operation Shylock, Roth shocks us into feelings that pieties could not induce. For all its laughs, the book is essentially a tragedy, and filled with tears. It brings us smack up against our most terrible losses and our utterly useless outrage at the fact of our extinction -- at the fact that, as Mickey Sabbath says, "There's nothing on earth that keeps its promise."

Let me quote a few more words of praise from Roth Pierpont. Consider what she says about his use of language:

However repellent Mickey Sabbath may be, though -- considered as a man of flesh rather than of words, a befouler of beige couches -- he is clothed in Roth's most gorgeous and expansive language. It gives him stature, humor, color, and charm far beyond his naked self and turns him into a Whitman of negativity, a figure of engulfing if improper vitality.

Roth Pierpont actually calls the book cheerful:

Sabbath's Theater is a very cheerfully dirty-minded book, elevating the familiar theme of sex as freedom into sex as a protest against the grave itself. And Mickey Sabbath protests quite a lot. Aside from any number of determinedly outrageous acts -- golden showers, graveside masturbation -- the book contains rhapsodic odes to the morning hard-on ... and the clitoris.... "Shocking" sexual antics had already become something of a default mode in American fiction, and Roth, since the advent of Zuckerman, had confined his heroes to little more than fleeting cartoon lust. But Sabbath is serious about sex, and he has met his match: a short, dark-haired, middle-aged Croatian emigre, a bit on the plump side, who runs an inn with her husband in New England and whose sexual appetite and contempt for rules surpass even Sabbath's. This prodigal's name is Drenka Balich, and the truly surprising aspect of her affair with Sabbath is not its every-which-way taboo-breaking sex but -- so much harder to bring off -- the depth and innocence of their love.

When reading, I did note a couple of passages that stood out for me. First is this one:

...tenderness for his own shit-filled life. And a laughable hunger for more. More defeat! More disappointment! More deceit! More loneliness! More arthritis! More missionaries! God willing, more cunt! More disastrous entanglement in everything. For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can't beat the nasty side of existence. I may not have been a matinee idol, but say what you will about me, it's been a real human life!

And, finally, this passage:

Madeline displayed the bright sadder-but-wiser outlook of an alert first grader who'd discovered the alphabet in a school where Ecclesiastes is the primer -- life is futility, a deeply terrible experience, but the really serious thing is reading.

Somehow my overall takeaway from Roth's Sabbath's Theater is that either you are turned off by it and and probably won't get past page twenty-five or you come to admire that there is something truly strange and different about Mickey Sabbath and his views of life, suffering, decline of the libido, and death. This is not a book for everyone.