Party-line feminists have hated Roth for years, and “Sabbath’s Theater” was surely written, in part, to get their goat. Sabbath’s mistress, Drenka, an appetitive East European amalgam of Mrs. Mala-prop and the Venus of Willendorf, is only too happy to be peed upon if she can reciprocate. It’s possible to savor Drenka’s very cartoonishness, but over the long haul she’s as wearisome as Sabbath’s boiler-plate rants against P.C. and 12-step programs. Even more desperate is Roth’s apparent attempt to stir up a literary feud by inventing a Savonarolesque feminist academic named Kimiko Kakizaki, whom Sabbath calls a “midget Jap”; so now the cognoscenti get to see if New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani pans this novel as she did his last. Oh wow.
Sabbath knows you’re not supposed to use ethnic slurs; that’s why he does it. Roth’s insistence on Sabbath as a walking affront to orthodoxy seems at first baldly self-congratulatory–or at least congratulatory. “I am disorderly conduct,” Sabbath intones, recalling his trial for fondling a woman’s breast during a street performance. Noted. “He says people couldn’t take their eyes off of you,” an old friend’s wife tells him. “A force. A free spirit.” Got it. Yet the painfully smart Sabbath knows just where free spirits fit in the scheme of things. “Yeah, well,” he tells the wife, “a lot of well-bred people need their real-lifer.” He gamely makes his decrepitude a tool of liberation when seducing female students into phone sex. “The very repugnance that his aging body inspired” frees their “budding perversity” and gives them “the confused exhilaration that comes of flirting with disgrace.” But despite Sabbath’s reveling in his own downhill slide–pan-handling in the subway while reciting from “King Lear,” planning his suicide–he doesn’t kid himself that it’s ennobling.
Mickey Sabbath is less a free-standing character than an archetypal construct, a descendant of Lear, Falstaff, Don Quixote and Yeats’s wild old wicked men–not to mention Lenny Bruce and Philip Roth. Yet in scene after scene, Roth offers the traditional novelistic pleasures. Sabbath’s visit to a 100-year-old relative, exquisitely balancing the gentle and the goofy, tries for Shakespearean quietude and almost makes it. His attempt to seduce his old friend’s wife is a comic opera of self-deluded intrigue. And that ending: a Henny Youngmanesque one-liner toward which the whole book has been moving as surely as fate. Lear, losing all, gains self-knowledge and compassion; Sabbath is simply left to rub his hands at the fire of his own outrage. But he wouldn’t have it any other way.
