Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth

First published: 1995

Type of plot: Comic realism

Time of work: The 1940’s to the 1990’s

Locale: New York, New Jersey, and New England

Principal Characters:

• Mickey Sabbath, the protagonist, a former puppeteer
• Nicki, Sabbath’s first wife, who disappears mysteriously
• Roseanna, Sabbath’s second wife, who becomes an alcoholic
• Drenka, Sabbath’s Croatian American mistress
• Dijkta, Drenka’s husband, the owner of a local inn
• Matthew, Drenka’s son, a police officer
• Morty, Sabbath’s brother, killed in World War II
• Nick Cowan, Sabbath’s friend in New York
• Johnson, a carpenter in love with Drenka
• Cousin Fish, Sabbath’s one-hundred-year-old cousin
• Lincoln Gelman, Sabbath’s onetime theatrical sponsor

The Novel

Sabbath’s Theater is a story about a man at the end of his rope, a man for whom life is a punishment. He is shown in the last stages of that life, when he has to decide whether he will continue to live or whether he should commit suicide. Morris (Mickey) Sabbath is a sixty-four-year-old former puppeteer and a sexual deviant consumed by lust. His life revolves around one aberrant sexual exploit after another. In the 1950’s, he runs a puppet theater opposite the gates of Columbia University in New York City. He uses his fingers as puppets and as a vehicle for fondling young girls in his audience. He is caught, and an indecency charge is filed against him. Sometime soon after, his first wife Nikki disappears without a trace. Disconsolate, he leaves New York with his lover Roseanna for the quiet and simplicity of a small Massachusetts town.

Sabbath, however, is incapable of leading a simple life. Very quickly, he finds a way to complicate it. Although he secures a job directing theater at a local college, his career is cut short when he is forced to resign over a scandal with a coed. During these years in Massachusetts, Roseanna, now his wife, becomes an alcoholic. Living with Sabbath is too much for her. He destroys her sense of well-being and confidence and makes her life a hell. She becomes the target of his frustration and despair. Even when she is recovering, he goads her mercilessly.

When he finds his home life no longer appealing, Sabbath becomes involved in an adulterous affair with an exotic and powerful Croatian American woman, Drenka Balich, who with her husband owns the local inn. With Sabbath’s encouragement, she develops erotic needs that know no bounds. She is not only promiscuous but also unquenchable. Sabbath encourages her to have affairs with other men and then to describe them in detail to him. Much of Sabbath’s sexual pleasure comes from listening to these descriptions. However, the book takes a tragic turn when Drenka develops cancer. Her slow and painful death leaves him a desperate man capable of anything, including suicide.

The plot unfolds in a series of powerful flashbacks to various moments in his life that deal with major personal losses. The first of those is an experience from Sabbath’s years as a teenager. His beloved older brother Morty enlisted during World War II, became a pilot, and was shot down and killed by the Japanese in 1944. Morty’s death destroys the family. Morty’s loss slowly drives his mother insane, and throughout the novel Sabbath relives that death and his mother’s insanity as if both events happened yesterday. Other losses compound his sense of despair and send him reeling: the disappearance of his first wife, his loss of his career as puppeteer, the end of his career as theater director, Roseanna’s alcoholism, and finally the loss of his beloved Drenka. When his best friend and former business investor, Lincoln Gelman, dies, Sabbath decides to leave Roseanna and drive to New York for the funeral. Part of his motivation for attending the funeral is to see how it is done so that he can prepare his own.

In New York, he finds refuge in the home of an old friend, Norm Cowan, whom he promptly repays by trying to seduce his wife and engaging in sex with a graduation picture of Cowan’s pretty daughter. The last sections of the book describe Sabbath’s futile attempt to kill himself. In a bizarre ending fitting for a bizarre book, a stranger thwarts Sabbath’s final act. In a macabre series of events, he is forced to go on living. The book ends with Sabbath remarking bitterly that there is no point to killing himself because “everything I hate is here.”

The Characters

Mickey Sabbath is not a new character to readers familiar with Roth’s work. Perhaps the first version was Alexander Portnoy, the protagonist of Roth’s 1969 Portnoy’s Complaint. They share a colossal misogyny, self-hatred, enormous libidinous energies, world-weariness, and boredom. They lack a spiritual center that might be a guide through the turmoil of life. For them, there is no meaning in anything except self-gratification, which turns out to be an empty exercise. Sabbath’s efforts to find gratification through sex know no limits. His unleashed libido is capable of the most grotesque forms of experimentation. Yet that satisfaction is only momentary and only leads him to more bizarre experimentation.

Yet Sabbath is the psychological center of this novel. All the other characters are projected as he sees them and interacts with them. Although deformed in many ways, Sabbath is capable of love, or at least remembered love. His love for his immediate family is a critical element in his psyche. He remembers a happy childhood for the family of mother, father, Morty, and himself. As the younger brother, Sabbath looked up to Morty, who in high school not only earned good grades but also was well liked, a star athlete, and president of his class. During the war, Morty decided to enlist; when the family learned that he had been shot down and killed in combat by the Japanese, they were devastated by grief. His mother began a slow decline into insanity, and his father lost interest in life. Sabbath’s response, perhaps to protect his own sanity, was to develop an intense hatred of anything Japanese.

Sabbath’s various love affairs with Nikki, Roseanna, and Drenka are very passionate, at least until the passion burns out, as it does with both Nikki and Roseanna. His love affair with Drenka, however, does not burn out, and his caring and tenderness for her through the final six months of her life suggest a kind of redemption. Yet that redemption is tempered by the reader’s awareness that Sabbath’s lovemaking required that Drenka unleash her own storm of passion and lavish it on a whole series of other men. Roth does not condemn Drenka for her adultery. Rather, she comes off as nearly an earth-mother figure. Her sexuality and good humor attain nearly mythic proportions. The fullness of her character, her joy in life, and her sexuality are reminiscent of James Joyce’s Molly Bloom.

Critical Context

A winner of the 1995 National Book Award for fiction, Sabbath’s Theater was published thirty-five years after Roth first won the award for his widely acclaimed 1959 first novel Goodbye Columbus. Sabbath’s Theater, Roth’s twenty-first book, represents something of a breakout from what critics had noted as a relatively quiet time in the author’s life, a period that followed his fight with depression in 1987. During this “quiet time,” Roth’s father died; his death is the subject of Patrimony (1991). Roth also published the autobiographical The Facts (1988) and the novel Deception (1990). These books lack the verbal pyrotechnics for which Roth is famous, and many critics concluded that Roth had entered a new, more mellow phase. In Operation Shylock (1993), Sabbath’s Theater (1995), American Pastoral (1997), and I Married a Communist (1998), however, Roth appears to have returned to form, pouring out verbal venom unequaled by any other writer of his generation. The themes of his earlier work—misogyny, sexual indulgence, alienation of the modern Jew, and self-hatred—are back in full force.

Critical reception of Sabbath’s Theater was mixed. Some reviewers expressed a preference for Operation Shylock and An American Pastoral, commenting that those books tell richer stories, are less claustrophobic, and embrace more of the cultural and historical events of their time. Sabbath’s Theater, on the other hand, tells the story of one man and his obsessive concerns, a character largely outside history. He does not read the newspapers or watch television; his great interest is lust and personal loss. Unlike Operation Shylock and An American Pastoral, therefore, Sabbath’s Theater lacks a base in the context of history and ideas.

Bibliography

Cooper, Alan. Philip Roth and the Jews. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. An excellent book that explores the range and depth of Roth’s work, including some juvenilia and lesser known works and Sabbath’s Theater. Cooper discusses the material in the context of the political, social, and literary climate surrounding each work.

Greenberg, R. M. “Transgression in the Fiction of Philip Roth.” Twentieth Century Literature 43, no. 4 (Winter, 1997): 487-506. Places Sabbath’s Theater in the context of Roth’s previous novels that deal with the protagonist’s transgressing against society. Sabbath is an absurd hero who, like his forbears, believes in nothing.

Kelleter, F. “Portrait of the Sexist as a Dying Man: Death, Ideology, and the Erotic in Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater.” Contemporary Literature 39, no. 2 (Summer, 1998): 262-302. Kelleter discusses the major themes of the novel, which he identifies as death, eros, and ideology. An excellent in-depth article.

Shatzky, Joel, and Michael Taub. Contemporary Jewish Novelists: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Good sourcebook for biographic and critical information on Roth, including critical information about Sabbath’s Theater.

Wisse, Ruth R. “Sex, Love, and Death.” Commentary, December, 1995, 61-65. Wisse notes that Sabbath is an autonomous character, unlike so many of Roth’s previous heroes. She points out several relationships between Roth’s work and Kafka’s and concludes that Roth’s work falls short of Kafka’s.

Wood, James. “My Death as a Man.” The New Republic, October 23, 1995, 33-39. Wood describes Sabbath’s Theater as a departure from Roth’s books that present the author in disguise. Sabbath is a character larger than life and a character unto himself.