Sabbath's Theater
by Philip Roth
Summary
Mickey Sabbath is sixty four, a former underground puppeteer with wrecked, arthritic hands, run out of his college teaching job by scandal, supported in the Massachusetts hills by a wife who despises him, and the novel opens with the death of the one person he cannot live without: Drenka Balich, a Croatian innkeeper's wife, his mistress of thirteen years and his match in appetite, carried off by cancer within six months.
What follows is the least housebroken major novel in American literature. Sabbath, grief deranged, sets off on a pilgrimage that is equal parts suicide reconnaissance and vaudeville: to New York for a friend's funeral, into the guest room and the family secrets of a successful old colleague, and finally home to the Jersey shore of his boyhood, where the book's true wound lies waiting, his brother Morty, shot down by the Japanese in 1944, the death that broke his mother into a ghost who now accompanies Sabbath, perched invisibly at his shoulder, urging him toward the sea. The scene in which he finds Morty's belongings, the flag, the yarmulke, the letters, in a dying cousin's carton, is as unbearable as anything Roth wrote, and it sits fifty pages from episodes of such deliberate obscenity that the book lost prizes, readers and friendships.
That is the design: Sabbath uses outrage the way other men use drink, to keep death audible and life loud, and the famous last line refuses him even the exit.
Around four hundred and fifty pages.
Best for readers who can stand fiction with no decency filter at all, in exchange for grief rendered at maximum voltage.
Historical Context & Significance
Sabbath's Theater won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1995, thirty five years after Goodbye, Columbus had won Roth his first, the longest span between wins in the fiction prize's history, and it arrived trailing scandal by design: Michiko Kakutani in the Times found it distasteful and could barely finish; Harold Bloom pronounced it Roth's masterwork; both notices are accurate to the experience. Roth himself, asked late in life to rank his books, named it his best, above the Pulitzer winning American Pastoral that followed two years later.
The award opened the extraordinary last act, the American trilogy, The Human Stain, The Plot Against America, in which the scandal machine of the early career converted itself into the national historian nobody had predicted.
Sabbath has kept his afterlife on the stage as well: John Turturro carried a 2023 theatrical adaptation in New York. The book remains the dividing line among Roth's readers, and he liked it that way.