Roth, Philip.

Sabbath’s Theater.

Advance Reading Copy. Boston / New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995. 15.5 x 23cm. 451 pages. Original softcover. Excellent condition.

This is Roth in full sardonic, outrageous cry – a sort of Portnoy for a later generation, gonads miraculously intact, but with an overlay of hard-won wisdom, celebration and regret. Mickey Sabbath is an elderly relic of the diabolical young puppeteer who was once arrested for coaxing a young Columbia student’s breast out of her blouse with the sheer effrontery of his insinuating performing fingers. Now, living in obscure poverty in New Hampshire with a wife who’s in aggressive recovery from the alcoholism to which he has driven her, he is reviewing his life – and continuing to act on his remarkable principles, which exemplify what one of his few remaining friends calls “a remarkable panegyric for obscenity.” Not, one would think, a sympathetic subject, and at first Mickey’s overwhelming misanthropy and obsessive eroticism make the reader uneasy. Soon, however, Roth’s insidious skill at deeply involving the reader in a seemingly alien world begins to work its magic. Mickey’s memories of the death of his cherished older brother in WWII and his growing up on the Jersey shore; a visit he pays to a centenarian uncle; and the way he picks out a grave in the ratty Jewish cemetery where his family is laid – these are passages that could only be the work of a master novelist, profoundly funny, poignant and human. By the time Mickey has said goodbye to Drenka, in one of the most moving – and perverse – deathbed scenes in literature, then been arrested by her policeman son for lovingly urinating on her grave, it is clear there is nothing Roth cannot accomplish – and somehow turn into a seriocomic affirmation. [From Publishers Weekly]

• Keywords: 20th century · American Authors · American Literature · Fiction · Literature · Novel
• Language: English
• ISBN: 9780395739822
• Inventory Number: 91226AB

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