Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth REVIEW

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Hi everyone, here's the Bookchemist once again. Today I'm reviewing Sabbath's Theater, one of Philip Roth's most notorious novels, but not necessarily one of his most often discussed, at least not in my circles, possibly because of its uncontrollable, rambunctious, controversial power.

[00:00:19]Philip Roth is very much a devilish sort of writer. You can tell in anything that he has written that he likes to poke the sore spots in our psyche, in our society, in our ideas about ourselves, and that's never as obvious as here in his masterpiece about the satanic side of life and of sex, if the two things can even be said to be separate. Mickey Sabbath, the protagonist of the book, is a serial adulterer who at one point was a a puppeteer of some renown. It was It was famous at one point in the '50s, in the '60s in New York City, uh because of his outrageous puppet show called Sabbath's Indecent Theater.

[00:01:05]But in the novel's present, he's in his mid-60s, he's plagued by arthritis in his hands, and he's unable to perform anymore. He is inordinately lecherous.

[00:01:17]Um he longs constantly for his youth, whoring as a as a mar as a as a seaman and then later as a GI.

[00:01:26]Um he um was recently disgraced after it emerged that as a professor at a local college, he had sex with his undergraduate students. He makes ruthless fun of his wife, who's a recovering alcoholic, and he is um stubbornly racist. Especially He he he hates the Japanese especially. So so far, he sounds like an average Joe.

[00:01:51]People who fit this description, you know, rule many countries in the world these days.

[00:01:57]Um but unlike those people, Sabbath is also well-read and fairly educated. He has a very supple, very agile mind, and he has quite an, let's say, interesting outlook on existence. His embrace of vice and lust forms almost a philosophical outlook on life, um a view that embraces the Dionysian dimension of life as a way of rejecting any illusion about life's decency, its integrity, even its coherence or uh its consistency as a phenomenon. Life, as the novel states at one point, tends toward incoherence. A couple of obvious parallels offer themselves up other than Dostoevsky, but I'm not big on Dostoevsky, so I won't go there. Uh the first one that comes to mind is Alexander Portnoy, the protagonist of Roth's own Portnoy's Complaint, another oversexed Jewish man who is harshly opinionated about women and who spends an inordinate amount of time uh thinking about matters of masturbation, degradation, the significance of a particular sex act versus another. But I would argue that Portnoy's Complaint, while very much an astute novel, is also a joke, fundamentally. Uh it can be a dark joke, it can be a serious joke at some point, but a joke nonetheless.

[00:03:25]Whereas Sabbath's Theater can be really very funny at times in an extremely non-PC sort of way, but I would argue that it is anything but a joke. The other comparison that comes to mind is with Humbert Humbert, the protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, another man of dark, horrid desires who is engaged in a long defense of his um baser impulses.

[00:03:51]Uh these are both novels that ask us in a fairly treacherous way to entertain the basic humanity of deeply indecent people. And granted, any novel worth its salt will ask that of the reader, but these novels do that to a a higher degree, offering us characters of horrible, criminal desires. This is then a fairly difficult book, especially in the first half. It goes into quite a lot of detail when it comes to describing Sabbath's perversions and his acts. I don't think of myself as a prude, although I am perhaps a little squeamish, but I found myself in the first hundred pages or so sometimes wondering, man, is this going to be 450 pages of of this, of the same? Um and it isn't, by the way, it isn't. But what I'm trying to say is, be aware of it of what type of book this is before you get into it. Expect to be offended. Consider whether it's the book for you. You will spend quite a lot of time in the company of a of a man who, I'm sure we can all agree, is a very bad person. But not an equivocally all-around evil person, either. Mind much like Satan himself, much like the devil whenever he comes up in fiction, um in in representations of it in art, is a very interesting character. The question that comes up uh with Sabbath time and again that is maybe suspended throughout the entire novel is whether Sabbath is for real. Does he really mean all of his exaggerated uh uh outbursts and reflections on desire, sexuality, life, decency, um the relationship between the aged and the young, men and women, etc. Is it just an act? Is he exaggerating all of these views to turn himself into a puppet now that he can't perform with his hands anymore? Has he turned his entire life into the next act in Sabbath's Indecent Theater? At one point in the book, Sabbath himself confesses that he can't really tell. Uh it's hard to tell. And it's true, sometimes you can take irony to a certain stage where it becomes hard to tell whether you're exaggerating your your views, you're joking, or you've started embracing them genuinely. This ambiguity and this ambivalence in Sabbath is very evident in one aspect of his story, uh which is his suicidal intent. Uh in the novel's present as the novel unfolds, Sabbath is going through an especially low moment in his life. His longest-standing and most beloved uh mistress, a woman called Drinka, who was of who had an appetite as voracious and deviant as Sabbath's own, has recently passed away, and Sabbath seems to be plotting he to take his own life. But is he serious about it? Is he really planning to do it? Or is it just a joke?

[00:06:53]Incidentally, Drinka is one of the great characters in the novel. As I said, she's every bit as lecherous as Sabbath, but she's also a beloved innkeeper. She is a um caring and um concerned mother.

[00:07:08]She is perhaps not a loving wife, but definitely a supportive wife, among many other things. Uh she has basically all of the markers that society generally associates with well-adjusted, high-functioning human beings. Sabbath is very much a larger-than-life figure, a a puppet-like figure, if you will, but Drinka isn't. And through her, the novel can drive across what I think is one of its most important points, the idea that the satanic forces discussed here in such great detail are very much a part of life and a part of existence, right or wrong do they may be.

[00:07:45]Uh they don't just belong to satyrs and other monsters, but to normal people, too. You can pretend otherwise if you want to, and by all means, you shouldn't embrace your impulses the way Sabbath does, but that doesn't change the fundamental fact that life is messy and dark. That, to quote the novel again, we are immoderate because our grief is immoderate. The book, by the way, is rife with these very powerful aphorisms about life that really pack a punch when you encounter them in the course of the narrative. It's not a surprise then, by the way, that Sabbath uh hates the Muppets, the Muppet Show, uh because to him, puppets are entertainment for adults. They are an art form. They are meant to represent life in all of its gory recklessness.

[00:08:32]They're not meant to be sanitized child's play. Although, of course, as it should be in a novel, uh Sabbath's hate is also rooted in experience. We learn quite early on that Sabbath was actually offered the chance to join the Muppet Show early on, and he turned it down because he thought it was a uh he didn't believe in the project. It It wasn't for him. And in that way, he renounced untold amounts of wealth and now lives in a relative destitution. The other character that really stands out for me is Norman, who is one of um Sabbath's oldest friends and an old business associate of his who tries to help him out during this dark period in his life that Sabbath is going through.

[00:09:15]See, Sabbath's life is not at all uh without pain. His brother, to whom he was uh really close growing up, died during World War II. Incidentally, he was killed by the Japanese.

[00:09:29]Um his mother never recovered from that trauma and spent the following 50 years in a state of mourning stupor. Uh his first wife disappeared at a very murky time in their life, uh leaving him permanently wounded, uh permanently wondering whether she might still be alive somewhere, where she she might have ended up. That line that I quoted about how we are immoderate because our grief is immoderate, believe me, Sabbath's theater is very persuasive at making you perceive just a glimpse, a tiny glimpse of quite how immoderate grief can be, quite how much pain can fit into a person's life. But, just as you start to sympathize with Sabbath, just as you start to believe that he might just be a curmudgeon with a heart of gold, a dirty old man to whom a few bad things have happened, he does something new and disgusting to make you change your mind again. This is not the kind of novel that lets you off the hook that easily.

[00:10:32]So, I was saying, some of the most disgusting things that Sabbath does in the novel, he does them to Norman himself, to this guy who was been nothing but extremely supportive and generous toward him, who really believed in his part in his puppet indecent theater, who helped him out when he when he got into trouble because of the theater back in the uh in the '60s, I believe.

[00:10:57]Um And Sabbath just treats him like dirt.

[00:11:01]This guy was the embodiment of liberal success. He's rich, he's educated, he's got an apartment facing Central Park. Sabbath's actions against Norman eventually push him to the breakpoint, but even then Norman isn't painted as just a dupe, a dumb privileged guy who helped Sabbath out just out of cluelessness. Far from it, in fact, Norman is given some of the most astute lines in the novel and is able to >> [clears throat] >> poke holes through some of Sabbath's ideas about himself, some of his grand views on life. At one point, Norman engages in this defense of common things, of marriage, a job, everyday ordinary things. And he does so in a way that I find very persuasive. This idea that sure, life might be endless pain and chaos, but embracing this chaos is not necessarily the only or even the best way of facing this fact.

[00:12:07]Norman is also able to to make fun and to burst Sabbath's own conceptions of his nature as this force for controversy and this enemy of the establishment, pointing out that his indecent theater was revolutionary perhaps in the repressive '50s, but in the 1990s, what is he trying to prove? Who is he fighting against exactly? At one point, Sabbath remembers his grandma and the way she used to eat corn on the cob with her dentures on, how she would ravish the experience of eating this corn, and the fact that his mother, who was otherwise unflappable, was really disgusted seeing this old woman eating this corn. And the novel reflects on the fact that what affords the one with delight afford the other with disgust, the ridiculous interplay.

[00:13:01]And that's a very good description of life, I find, and Sabbath's theater explores the ridiculous interplay with great playfulness and great gusto. This is a novel that includes a scene of immense tenderness between two lovers that focuses on a golden shower. Really, the feeling reading Sabbath's theater is that the tenderness and the love, especially between Sabbath and Branca and between Sabbath and his brother Morty, are the underside of all the the lust and the bravado and the racism, that the two things, all of these different sides are inherently intertwined, and one aspect almost runs through the other inescapably.

[00:13:49]I've said that it's a novel about life and about sex, but now I wonder whether it isn't about the thing that kind of contains both, which is death. The passages toward the end of the book, where Sabbath gains possession of some of his brother's old things, some of his brother's possessions from when he was alive, are passages of really powerful delicacy and beauty and and impact. It's impossible to describe them. They're so moving and and impactful. Sabbath's theater is not for everybody, and it's not easy, and it's very offensive, but I think it's a great testimony about life, which ultimately is what a novel should be. Since leaving academia and since leaving my work on American literature, I actually very rarely get to tackle uh books of this type, books that take such liberties and and embrace their material with such freedom, the kind of book that can spend 10, 20 pages on a conversation or rambly uh cyclical conversation between a an old man having a breakdown and an even older man who's senile and is losing his grip on what's going on around him.

[00:15:07]Um spend all of these pages without any concern for keeping the reader hooked or any of that type of showmanship. Not that a different, higher type of showmanship isn't involved in that type of performance and this type of art, of course. I struggled with it, especially in its first half, but I also found it incredibly nourishing. It's the kind of book that leaves you feeling like you've got a new perspective on the human condition, which is not a bad way, if you ask me, to spend 3 pounds and a few afternoons of your life.

[00:15:42]Um I highly recommend to anybody who isn't scared by the premise behind the book and who's maybe already experienced Roth's devilish side in some of his other novels. What do you think? Do you regard it among Roth's great works? Are you a bit skeptical about it?

[00:16:02]Are you curious if you haven't read it yet? Let me know. Look forward to discussing the book in the comments, as always. Thank you for watching the review. Thank you a a lot, so much, to my patrons for supporting the YouTube channel. That's really cool.

[00:16:15]And bye, everybody.

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