Sabbath's Theater

First edition cover

Sabbath's Theater (1995, ISBN 0-679-77259-6) is a novel by Philip Roth about the exploits of 64-year-old Mickey Sabbath. It received the 1995 National Book Award for Fiction (US).

Summary and themes

Mickey Sabbath (modeled after American Jewish painter R.B. Kitaj) is an unproductive, out-of-work, former puppeteer with a strong affinity for whores, adultery, and the casual sexual encounter. Sabbath takes great pleasure in his status as the (prototypical) "dirty old man." He takes an equal pleasure in manipulating the people around him, primarily women—in a sense, they play the same role as his puppets. The loss of a decades-long sexual sidekick—the equally depraved Drenka—precipitates a crisis in a life he has long considered an utter failure. Sabbath wonders whether he should simply take his own life, thereby heeding the advice of the ghost of his departed mother, a frequent visitor who urges suicide as the fitting end for his failed life.

Reception

Literary critic Harold Bloom has declared Sabbath's Theater Roth's "masterwork." In an interview with the Morning News prominent literary critic James Wood said of the book, "I am a great fan of Sabbath’s Theater, it was an extraordinary book." It received the 1995 National Book Award for fiction. New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani found it hard to finish and "distasteful and disingenuous".