THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 17, 1995 TAG: 9509150500
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER
LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines
SABBATH'S THEATER.
PHILIP ROTH
Houghton Mifflin. 451 pp. $24.95.
Mickey Sabbath makes Alex Portnoy look like a choirboy. He makes Humbert Humbert look like a model citizen. Sabbath, who's the subject of Philip Roth's new novel, Sabbath's Theater, is the supreme scuzball.
The book's title is another of Roth's sendups of Jewish convention. Jewish law, after all, encourages mixing sex and the Sabbath, but Roth takes it to unimagined proportions.
Sabbath's proclivities drown the novel in a flood of vulgarity, unredeemed by the occasional reminders of Roth's sharp wit. This is Roth at his worst.
Sabbath, an unemployed puppeteer in his 60s, constantly reads books about death and schleps around New England wearing his trademark flannel shirt and hunting jacket. A victim - as he sees it - of one personal disaster after another, he contemplates suicide.
First, when he was a kid, his brother, Morty, was killed in the war, snuffing out his parents' happiness for the rest of their lives. Then there was Nikki, his first wife, an actress who mysteriously disappeared. ``Nikki,'' he remembers, ``all talent, enchanting talent, and absolutely nothing else. She couldn't tell her left from her right, let alone add, subtract, multiply or divide.''
Wife No. 2, Roseanna, is a reformed alcoholic who spouts AA-talk. They live together, but that's about it. ``They each found it repellent to catch even a glimpse of the other unclothed,'' Roth writes.
Ah, but there was Drenka, the zaftig innkeeper's wife, a sybaritic sensation with whom he kept up an affair for years: ``A conventional woman who would do anything. A respectable woman who was enough of a warrior to challenge his audacity with hers.''
But he is lost when she is struck down with cancer. ``This can't be so,'' Sabbath cries to his mother's ghost. ``First Morty, then you, then Nikki, now Drenka. There's nothing on earth that keeps its promise.''
Trouble is, there's not an ounce of humanity in Sabbath to evoke any sympathy on the reader's part. As I read Sabbath's Theater, a ponderously long book, I thought: Live, don't live. Just decide already.
This is a guy who gets convicted for indecency after he persuades a college student to take off her bra during a puppet show - and gets her more involved in the show, so to speak. ``This is my art!'' he pleads to the judge, in vain.
A guy who gets bounced out of a college teaching job after a tape of him engaging in phone sex with a student goes public.
A guy who, while waiting to visit his wife in an alcohol treatment center, attempts to sleep with another patient by offering to buy her some vodka.
His doubts about life don't improve his character much. While visiting his old producer friend Norman, he steals a pair of his daughter's panties, propositions the friend's wife and has his way with the maid.
Norman, his patience run dry, berates Sabbath for being ``the walking panegyric for obscenity. . . .What a pathetic, outmoded old crank you are, Mickey Sabbath.'' And, still, there is no remorse.
What makes the novel even more repulsive is the profusion of graphic sex scenes, which involve, among other things, urination and autoerotic visits to Drenka's grave. Sabbath's Theater is bloated and digressive, not the taut prose that established Roth's reputation.
And it lacks the pinpoint wit that propelled Portnoy's Complaint. (Remember the wild liver scene and the psychiatrist's hilarious line ending the novel: ``Now vee may perhaps to begin?'') There are, however, glimmers of Roth's greatness.
For instance, this is Crawford, the cemetery attendant, trying to sell Sabbath on a plot: ``A nicer section. You'll be better off. The other you got the gate swinging next to you, you got the traffic in and out. . . .''
Roth made his mark precisely by daring to be different. He shattered the nice Jewish boy stereotype in Portnoy and mocked conventions like the ostentatious wedding reception in Goodbye Columbus.
In Sabbath's Theater, though, there is no redeeming value. This time, his editor should have been the one to ask: Now vee may perhaps to begin? MEMO: Philip Walzer is a staff writer. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
by CNB