Sabbath's Theater in Philip Roth... is awesome.

Jun 20, 2007 Joeji rated it really liked it

The number one complaint against anything that Philip Roth writes is his treatment of women. I would just like to say that Roth's men aren't exactly shining examples of human virtue. Is Roth a Man-sogynist? The truth is that Roth's characters can be grotesque and still garner readerly sympathy. I just want to put that one out there-I am not disputing that his books are not somewhat placed in a "male gaze" and that his textual treatment of women can be hard to take, but Roth is not Bret Easton El ...more

12 likes · Like · see review

Nov 30, 2012 Amin rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

Sabbath’s Theater is a work which is difficult to write about. Words like “moving”, “imaginative” or “deep” are not sufficient to describe it. At the end of the book you feel you’ve been reading four or five books and not just one. It’s a truly breathtaking read. It is Roth’s prose at its most dense. It’s one of those works which makes you put down the book every five pages, put your forehead on the table, and think and imagine for half an hour. The power and force is brutal.
First and foremost Sabbath’s Theater is a work which is difficult to write about. Words like “moving”, “imaginative” or “deep” are not sufficient to describe it. At the end of the book you feel you’ve been reading four or five books and not just one. It’s a truly breathtaking read. It is Roth’s prose at its most dense. It’s one of those works which makes you put down the book every five pages, put your forehead on the table, and think and imagine for half an hour. The power and force is brutal.
First and foremost the work seems to be a well-articulated attack on commitment and fidelity; marriage and marital life. But the philosophy never hurts the strong sense of wonder and curiosity that the reader experiences while discovering the past of Mickey Sabbath. The appeal and suspense never let go. The obscenity and outright immorality of the protagonist is always discovered by other characters in the most shockingly inappropriate ways and thus brings about feelings more varied than just alienation. There is thus a vile, almost vicious effrontery that might disgust many readers.
The narcissistic Sabbath is a middle finger by nature. He is the very same middle finger who got him into trouble. He is in his young days a premature example of a 60s sexual revolutionary. And his sexual rebelliousness outlives the societal changes of the century. Sex seems to be the only thing with which Sabbath manages to cling to his life. And he comes to the understanding that the puppeteer had been life itself all along, and not him.
Life is incoherent, and meaningless. There are two ways to escape this cruel incoherence. Death, and sex. And once again death and carnality merge in one single image in a Roth book. And this time it is even more obscene, and more extreme. An old man jerking off on the grave of his late beloved. An old man urinating on the grave of his late beloved. And when Sabbath is found by the son of the lover, a trooper, he explains to him the religious seriousness of what he has to do on the grave of his lover. Though Sabbath is desperate to give his lover’s son reason enough for killing him because he prefers being murdered to suicide, the seriousness of his actions on his lover’s grave are sufficiently serious. For sex endows life with coherence, just like religion. But unlike in religion, the coherence is not fake.
The comedy, the type of thrifty but powerful comedy which is always there in Roth’s works to make everything just a little bit more tragic, can be seen in Sabbath’s Theater too. The final scene in which Sabbath is left in the middle of nowhere with no means to kill himself and no one to murder him successfully sums up the absurdity that the whole novel is about.
...more

6 likes · Like · see review

Aug 12, 2011 Tracy Towley rated it liked it

Shelves: short-listed-for-the-pulitzer

Philip Roth is one of my favorite authors, and while there is plenty to like about Sabbath's Theater , I can't help but feel that of the 15+ books of his I've read, none quite so perfectly showcases all the things that Roth does wrong.

There's a lot of evidence that Roth is a misogynist, and while this book isn't quite as anti-woman as My Life As a Man, it's still a shining example of the way he treats his female characters. In Sabbath's Theater, they are all completely one dimensional ...more

Like · see review

Jun 07, 2011 Sheila rated it liked it

I read a review here that gave it a one star. A one-star for Philip Roth? That's not possible. I have read most of books, but I have three or four left. I have only started this one, read about 20 pages so far. One-star, no way. I didn't get past page 50. The writing, characters as usual are beyond reproach, but the subject matter (sex, sex, and more sex) is just not for me. ...more

Like · see review