Rating: 
Summary: Sabbath Puts the Id back in Yid
Review: A long time ago Alexander Portnoy (in an early Roth novel, Portnoy's Complaint) entreated someone, anyone, to put the id back in Yid.Mickey Sabbath, the dirty old man who is the central character in Sabbath's Theater, does just that, and more. Sabbath acts on every instinctive urge that comes his way, never stopping to imagine consequences. And those urges push him to sexual and other behavior that is always bizarre, and often downright shocking. At times I could not believe what I was reading. Yet at least a part of Sabbath's complicated motivation stems from his fear -- utter revulsion, really -- of death and all it entails. Death prevents Sabbath from seeing the need to ever conform to societal norms. And that blindness makes him a terribly tragic, yet very funny guy. There are portions of this book that blew me away, like Roth's/Sabbath's (sometimes it's hard to determine who's doing the talking) observations about marriage, infidelity, sex, death, art, academia, etc. Sabbath is ultimately a revolting character, and evokes little sympathy for his horrible plight. Yet he's one of the most fascinating characters in literature I've ever come across. This book is incredible and very worth reading. But be warned, it's not for the squeamish. If you haven't read Roth, start with Portnoy and imagine what he might have become if everything in his life went wrong.
Rating: 
Summary: My first Roth
Review: and I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it. Mickey Sabbath was so real that even his status as an absolutely moral-less anti-hero couldn't push me far enough away not to feel sorry for him as the story went on. Reading this book made me want to go out and do something totally outrageous just to feel more alive. I agree with many of the other reviewers. David Duke (the narrator of the audio book) did a superb job with accents, emotions and even sexual noises (although I wish he would have done the gorilla noises toward the end). The sex was too analytical to be erotic in most cases (which is good if you happen to be standing in line at the post office listening to it on tape). I do have to admit I fast forwarded through one of the scenes I found particularly disgusting and I wish I would have fast forwarded through another one of the scenes.
Rating:
Summary: Handle With Care
Review: Any praise for this novel -- and it deserves much praise -- requires a strong word of caution: much of this book is sexually explicit. That said, in my mind Sabbath's Theater is one of Roth's best -- third only to The Counterlife and Patrimony (both of which are very different from this one). It is also, weirdly enough (and sexual frankness aside) less of a typical Philip Roth book and more like a Saul Bellow book; a book that focuses intensely on one not very sympathetic person's life to raise questions about the way that all of us live. Sometimes funny, sometimes repulsive, sometimes gut-wrenchingly sad, the one thing that Sabbath has going for himself above all is the capability of being brutally honest. One man's id running wild may not be the prettiest picture you'll encounter in a book, but it sure is worth reminding ourselves that it is possible to opt out from conforming, albeit at great personal cost.
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Summary: A great tour de force
Review: into the life of a man driven to ruin, but remarkable to watch - given the great prose of philip roth... so who should play Mickey and Drenka in the movie?
Rating: 
Summary: Sex as a tedious obsession
Review: Mickey Sabbath is a cruel, cantankerous, racist, misogynist fiend, whose only purpose in life is to pursue the pleasures of the flesh--and he's proud of it. After 65 years of hedonistic living, he finds himself "wifeless, mistressless, penniless, vocationless, homeless." Much of his misanthropy was intensified by the premature disappearances of the three most important people in his life--his brother Morty, killed in combat during World War II; his first wife Nikki, who vanished into thin air (prompted, perhaps by Sabbath's philandering ways); and his insatiable mistress Drenka, who dies of cancer. "Something horrible is happening to Sabbath": hating the world that remains with him, he contemplates suicide and ceases to follow the random rules of civil society. Whether a reader will find Mickey Sabbath and his escapades humorous (and occasionally poignant) will depend on how funny one finds comedy that originates in obnoxious behavior. There are some brilliantly witty passages, such as when Sabbath wanders the East Village disguised as a bum and, during his panhandling foray, assails a Shakespeare-quoting subway passenger. Yet, much of the time, Sabbath seems too extreme in his hatred to be believable, and his embodiment as a swine whose motto may as well be "Erotic drunkenness, the only passionate life you can have" veers from literary parody to outright fantasy. Let's put aside the implausible gag that so many women find this physically unattractive, hygienically filthy, emotionally unstable lout somehow alluring. (This book does nothing to diminish the oft-voiced critique that Roth understands men at their worst quite well--and women not at all.) Sabbath's much-flaunted Jewishness or his previous career as a puppeteer seem beside the point as well. Instead, this novel comes down to sex. Nearly every reader has noted that, while explicit and often simply crude, the unremitting carnality is too "monotonous" or even "analytical" to be erotic. Roth wants us to imagine Sabbath as a sailor who ponders including "quotations from Shakespeare, Martin, and Montaigne" in a possible suicide note. Yet both Sabbath as character and Roth as narrator seem to know only two or three words for sexual acts or parts of the human anatomy that could be represented by countless expressions; when it comes to sex, language fails them and they sound like overeager frat-boys. (The dullness plummets to its nadir in an extended, unfunny footnote that replicates phone sex dialogue.) Entire sentences are repeated, nearly verbatim, from one libidinal description to the next--and sometimes within the same scene (I could provide a number of examples, but this is a family-accessible site). There's nothing really "salty" about this sailor. If Roth's intention is to numb the reader to Sabbath's gluttonous hedonism, then surely he succeeds: venery has never been so dreadfully boring. (This view will, of course, vary across generations; I suspect older male readers might find these passages titillating or perhaps humorous--or, more probably, offensive.) Roth seems to imagine licentious overindulgence as an amateurishly produced pornographic video set to "repeat" mode. What "Kill Bill" is to amputation, "Sabbath's Theater" is to sex--but at least Tarantino has enough sense to vary the camera angle and cinematographic technique from one scene to the next. The tedium of these episodes would be forgivable if they didn't comprise approximately half the novel. And it's too bad, because much of the rest of "Sabbath's Theater" lives up to Roth's reputation as a master satirist of American life--of our predilection for 12-step programs and our fascination with Loreena Bobbitt. As a whole, this novel (along with the equally moribund "Deception" and "Professor of Desire") shows Roth just spinning his wheels.
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Summary: i don't mind this
Review: Music ceases to be a cerebral construction and instead becomes a mainly physical experience if you stand within spitting of the front row of a 1000 piece steel orchestra, or actully put your head inside the base-bin of a fifteen foot high speaker. The rhythm and the base largely bypass your conciousness and just makes your muscles move, and the adrenalin flow. And so, similarly, Sabbaths Theatre manages to explode literature from the confines of ideas and into the realm of the immediately PHYSICAL. As well as being totally psycho-sexually terrifying, this is the is the most visceral and relentlessly blood curdling thing i ever read. This book causes some serious hormonal imbalances as it sets each and every chemical in the body raging into a situation of sheer EMERGENCY. One negative upshot of all of this physical and pschological panic is that PHILIP ROTH ACTUALLY GAVE ME PSORIASIS. But, you are purely addicted, and justify your next hit on the grounds that, yes, this really is an important insight into the state of 20th century, and beyond, western society, it's outrageous moralizing, sexual politics, and the structure of it's relationships. And in doing so your delicate identity becomes simply a site of repeated trauma. This is the 100% pure columbian of Literature. Sabbath's payload is the overwhelming sense that you are living your life as if a castrated dog, and that any kind of moral judgement applied to any kind sexual behaviour or impulse is inhumane. You will spend several weeks seeking sexuality-affirming experiences in some crazy-ass attempt at making your own life something approching AUTHENTIC. ALL OF THE TIME. your own second-hand Sabbath-styled rants will get delivered for the millionth time in your local bar, and your conversation skills will become the verbal equivalent of no holds barred XTREME boxing, or what ever it's called. The interesting thing is how well and sympathetically these ideas are recieved. Sabbath will take your own grievences about the numbing effect of living in civilisation, feed them through a 500 megawatt amplifier and spit them back in your face with uncompromisingly brutal and brilliant humour. A dangerous book for the over-impressionable. hilarious, unique and brilliant.
Rating: 
Summary: Self-indulgent diatribe obfuscated by sexual titillation
Review: Philip Roth has an unfortunate penchant for long polemics to skewer his notions of "political correctness" using contrived caricatures. I can't believe the focus on this book's reviewers is that the sexual content is shocking; not for the squeamish; salacious, etc. That that should be a readers difficulty with the material. I beg to differ. Unrealistic polemic and narcissism is what offends me. Then, again, incredulous, to me, that it won a National Book Award. Even his phone sex is boring! More a manipulative attempt to show he wasn't being a sexual predator than to engage in mutual erotic, orgasmic fantasy. Though it seems to have titillated some of his male reviewers. His political "skewers", which most reviewers have found amusing are the only things which shock me.
They act so woodenly; arbitrary and clumsy. Roth is at times inciteful, compassionate and courageous; but here and in his later novels, he is overindulgent, filled with a rage that is really mean. A petty man with petty grievances, given magnification by grotesqueness. Very disappointing.
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Summary: Roth's strongest book
Review: The giant of American letters produces another master piece.
Rating:
Summary: "I am disorderly conduct."
Review: The incredible Philip Roth, who gets stronger and stronger as the years go by, plunges further down into the sewer than he's ever gone before to give us Mickey Sabbath, an anti-hero if ever there was one. Think of him as Falstaff and Milton's Satan mixed with some Marquis de Sade....a personality so large and so outrageous that the more adventurous readers may find themselves shelving their morality for a little while in order to more gleefully bask in the filth. Sabbath is a 65-year-old man living in the quaint New England town of Madamaska Falls. He is a retired puppeteer (a dirty puppeteer, of course, until arthritis sidelined him), and now he lives off of a wife who is a recovering alcoholic, and spends all his free time and energy chasing the outermost boundaries of sexuality with Drenka, the inn-keeper's wife, who is more than willing to follow him to those boundaries and even lead him past them. A string of tragedies sends Mickey into a whirlwind and brings back a flood of memories from his troubled but colorful past. The narrative intermingling of past and present is on full display and will be familiar to readers of Roth. Also, this is one of the rare Roth books that doesn't have a first-person narrator, but an omniscient voice (of course, Roth's voice). Sabbath, however, is such an overwhelming presence that he often hijacks the narrative and runs off with it, particularly at those times when he seems to be coming apart at the seams. Those who are quick to always correlate the man Roth with his main characters should ask themselves how he can be so adept at switching points-of-view so quickly and without warning, and without risk of confusion. The answer is, because he's a master. Sabbath makes like Poldy in "Ulysses" and goes into stream-of-consciousness mode, and if you can get past the filth, you'll be privy to a character with a very disturbed internal life, but with a very strict code of conduct--"for a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can't beat the nasty side of existence." But a lot of filth there is, and this book could definitely alienate more sensitive readers. It would be an understatement to say that this is the dirtiest book Philip Roth has ever written. It's probably closer to home to say that Roth in this book makes Henry Miller look like Jane Austen. A cosmos of depravity peppers the pages, climaxing (sorry) at the end of the novel in a flashback with Mickey and Drenka which will leave you yellow. Of Roth's more recent novels, this one moves at the surest pace, and finds the most nerve-racking balance between low comedy and high tragedy. Only "Operation Shylock", I think, gives it a run for its money, though I'm very much looking forward to his new one in October, "The Plot Against America."
There is profundity in the darkest, seediest corner and Mickey Sabbath desperately wants to grab hold of it. And Philip Roth lets you ride along for the fun at a safe distance.
Rating:
Summary: Knocking at Death's Door
Review: This book is an old-fashioned, "shock the middle-class" novel, circa 1962, but actually written in the mid-1990's. It is silly, overly serious, pompous, and tiresome - but I must admit that it has some great paragraphs here and there (the cemetery scene is wonderful). I read the book because Roth is taken seriously by people I respect, but after reading this I now question their judgement.
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