Addict

Sabbath’s Theater from Novels 1993-1995 by Philip Roth.  Library of America.  842 pp. ****1/2

Where does all the bitterness come from? I kept asking myself as I read this—brilliant, in many ways—novel by Philip Roth.[1]  I understand that Roth was creating a character, that he was speaking through that character, that Mickey Sabbath is not Philip Roth, but at the same time, when a man spends months and years writing a book (and Roth was nothing if not dedicated to his craft) somehow his overall mood comes through in that book, and there is a bitterness toward life here that makes no sense to me, in this man whose career went from once success to another.

When Sabbath finally decides at the end of the novel—spoiler alert!—not to commit suicide, his reason is as follows, “How could he leave?  How could he go?  Everything he hated was here.”  That’s a funny line, the way much of Roth’s work is funny, but there’s a bitterness to the humor, like when you’re listening to one of those comedians who seem to hate the world.  You laugh to keep from screaming.  Your stomach’s in a knot.

It’s like Portnoy’s Complaint, that novel that was so shocking when it was published, and which resembled nothing so much as a long dirty joke, told by a stand-up comic.  People have said Sabbath is like Portnoy all grown up.

One of the most interesting things about this world-class novelist, often mentioned for the Nobel Prize until he died, is the way that so many women, just about all the women I know, and I’ve been checking around, viscerally hate the work of a man who feels and talks about women this way.[2]  My original intention was to write about The Female Persuasion and Sabbath’s Theater in the same review, a woman’s novel and a man’s novel, and although I can see that Roth is technically a greater writer (the structure of his novel is stunning; he seems to be just babbling on and recounting his life at random, but it finally all goes together, and works), the reading experience of going through the two books couldn’t be more different.  Warmth, was the overwhelming feeling I got from Meg Wolitzer’s novel, even though there was plenty of conflict, and some terrible things happened.  Bitterness is the feeling I get from this one.

Mickey Sabbath is a puppeteer who has had to give up his work because his hands are so arthritic that he can no longer use them.  In his heyday the actual puppets were just his fingers, but he was so inventive that they took on a life of their own (especially his middle finger.  Why am I not surprised?).  He could mesmerize a street audience by using his fingers as puppets.  In one instance he so mesmerized a young woman that, with his other hand, he unbuttoned her blouse and exposed her breast, in full view of others, including a police officer.  The policemen arrested him for indecency.  So Sabbath became an artist—like Lenny Bruce, like Roth himself—who was persecuted for being obscene.
But the overwhelming feeling you get from this story is that he is bitter not because he can’t practice his art, or was once persecuted for it.  His bitterness seems to be that he can’t have as much sex as he would like, which in his case is an infinite amount.  He had a lover who was his erotic ideal, not terribly good-looking, but one whose stout body was made for sex, and who liked it as much as he, and in much the same way: she was married to someone else but preferred her illicit romance with Sabbath.  He liked that too, also liked her to be active with other men, and recite her transgressions.  It was as if the point was to be transgressive, rather than to have sex.  But as the novel opens this woman is ill, and she soon dies (her last request is that he be faithful to her for a while, that he want only her, and it makes no sense to him.  It’s as if she’s asking him to be someone else). Sabbath by that time is in his Sixties and slowing down erotically anyway.

It’s as if Portnoy had grown up and lived his whole life the way he did when he was 13.  This is a man who masturbates on his mistress’s grave, who once drove up to her house with an erection already jutting out of his pants.  He is a man for whom sex is the be all and end all, the only thing that makes life worth living.  And he has to face life when sex isn’t happening anymore.

There is much more to the plot than I’ve mentioned.  Sabbath had two wives, one of whom—a much younger woman, whom he did seem to love, or at least yearn for—disappeared from the face of the earth.  She walked out one day and no one ever saw her again.  The second was also a younger woman, though middle-aged by the present time of the novel.  She had a lot of trouble with alcohol, finally found a drying out place and a twelve-step group that worked for her, spent the rest of her life working to stay sober and being mocked by her husband because all of the things she said about her recovery were banal (statements about recovery are like that.  One day at a time.  Easy does it.  They all might as well be bumper stickers).

I felt angry at him for that mockery, angrier still in a scene when he went to visit her at her drying out facility, and it was a big day for her, because she was telling her story that night, and he became attracted to another woman, who was (predictably) young and looked even younger, like a girl.  Not only was he on the verge of abandoning his wife on this important day and running off with this younger woman, but he was going to ply the woman with vodka—that was the deal; she’d go off with him for two quarts of vodka—and she seemed a much worse alcoholic than his wife.  What Sabbath was doing in that situation was unconscionable.  It was his nadir as a human being, and that’s saying something.

Obviously, I was involved in this novel, and it was vivid for me; I could go on and on.  Roth writes great sentences, and he keeps those pages turning.  And I’m fascinated by the subject of addiction; it was something I talked about by the hour to the best friend of my life, and I have always thought of myself as a sex addict, though I was nothing like this, my God.  I wasn’t even close.

I think that ultimately addiction is when we try to find a happiness and satisfaction outside ourselves—through alcohol, drugs, sex, shopping, work; the list is endless—that we can never finally find.  Imelda Marcus never had enough shoes.  We’re supposed to finally understand that we’re going down a trail that can only end in frustration, it can’t end in ultimate satisfaction, and so we make a change.  We quit looking outside ourselves.  We grow up, and begin to look inside.  Sabbath never does that.  He never comes close.  He’s Alexander Portnoy, jerking off until he’s had enough.  There is no enough.

[1] Apparently Frank Kermode and Harold Bloom, pretty fast company, both regarded it as the finest American novel of the last quarter of the twentieth century.

[2] I would love to hear from some women who feel otherwise.