Sabbath’s Theater

The test is subtractive, and the book half invites it. The excess is the argument: Sabbath answers death with appetite, and a lean book about him would contradict him. The spine is required: Drenka’s death; the funeral of his friend Linc, which takes him back to the city of his theatre; his stay with Norman and Michelle Cowan and his abuse of their hospitality; the visit to his ancient cousin at the Jersey shore and the box of his dead brother’s things; the return to Drenka’s grave. Inside that spine the riffs repeat. The sexual transcripts and recollections run past the point where they add knowledge; the provocations at the Cowans’ restate one another; some tirades are performance for its own sake, which the book knows, since its hero is a performer. Perhaps a seventh of the whole is permitted rather than compelled, and that holds the axis lowest of the twelve.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the outrage of a man who will not behave is grief, and the decorum he offends is a way of not looking at death. Sabbath’s obscenity, his thefts and his cruelties are found, late and fully, to rest on one fact, the death of his older brother Morty in the war, which broke their mother and made the boy a man who would never again consent to the ordinary. The second disclosure is the self as performance: a puppeteer who has lost the use of his hands performs himself instead, and the book will not let the reader decide whether anyone stands behind the act. Held at the bar and not above it because much of the force is a mood, a rage sustained for hundreds of pages, and because the women are seen almost wholly through Sabbath, so that the disclosure covers one man’s condition more than a shared one.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Elevation is frequent, and it comes in two registers, the comic-grotesque and the elegiac, often in the same scene. The box of Morty’s things, opened at the shore: the flag, the letters, the yarmulke, and Sabbath wrapping himself in the flag and wearing the cap, a grief so unguarded after so much aggression that it is the book’s height. The nights at Drenka’s grave, obscene and devout at once. Drenka dying in hospital. The mother’s ghost attending her son, the dead given a voice in the narration as plainly as the living. And the comic sublime of the tirades, which at their best reach a Rabelaisian height of their own. Held below the top because the obscene register, sustained, flattens by repetition, and because the elegiac heights gather in the later stretches of the book; the earlier ones rise less often.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Myth built in part. Shakespeare is the frame: the epigraph is Prospero’s, and Sabbath is the magician of a small theatre who has lost his art and has only his grave to think of; his last movement, raging, abdicating every decency, toward a death he cannot bring himself to take, is Lear’s. Beneath it runs an older figure, the satyr or Pan, a god of appetite in the New England hills, offending the town. The descent to the dead is built: the funeral, the cemetery, the mother’s ghost, the brother’s box, and the hero’s return from the underworld still alive and unable to leave. These bear weight. Held below the gate because much of the Shakespeare is quotation and allusion carried by Sabbath’s own learning, evoked as much as built, and because the satyr is a manner more than a structure: Sabbath stays a particular man, an archetype only in flashes.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The inheritance is the Jewish American comic novel of Bellow and of Roth himself, the confessional monologue of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), and behind them the carnival line of Rabelais, Céline and Henry Miller. The turn is in age and in refusal: an old man’s carnality and rage given at full length, with no apology, no redemption and no frame of irony to excuse it, in a decade whose literary culture had grown wary of exactly this. The stake was real. Roth risked, and received, the charge that the book was repellent and that its author shared its hero’s contempt, and the book is still argued on those terms; it also opened the most productive decade of his career. Held below the gate because the instrument, the voice that runs on and spares nothing, had been Roth’s own since 1969, and the swerve is one of degree and of age more than of means.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The narration is in the third person but owned by Sabbath’s voice, slipping into his speech, his imagined interlocutors, his self-prosecution and his self-defence; the dead speak in it as easily as the living. The form is theatre: the novel is Sabbath’s last performance, and the reader is its audience, made complicit by laughter in what it is asked to judge. Told in a detached third person, the book would be a case study of a degenerate; told in the first person, a confession with a confessor’s bias. As it stands it can be inside him and see round him at once. Time folds back without warning to the 1950s, to his youth at sea and to the war, so that the past arrives as it arrives to him. Held off the top because the form’s moves recur, and stretches of riff are containers for performance rather than instruments of knowledge.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Evidence over thirty-one years, real and contested. The book is central to the criticism of late Roth and to the long argument about his treatment of women; it is read beside Shakespeare and the carnival tradition, as an elegy for the Jewish American century, as a novel of old age, and as a test case in the ethics of reading a repellent hero. Its questions stay open: whether the book condemns Sabbath, celebrates him or does neither; whether the brother’s box explains him or only adds one more act; whether the ending, the hero unable to die, is defeat or vitality; whether Drenka is a person or Sabbath’s invention of her. On return the early chapters read differently once the box is known. Held below the higher figures because part of the argument the book has sustained is about its author, and because the obscene surface, once absorbed, yields less on the fifth reading than the elegy beneath it.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The field is the American novel of the 1990s. The intrinsic force: the book showed that the comic monologue of an appetitive man could carry elegy, and that the old man’s novel of rage and decline could be written at full pitch rather than in the mode of resignation. But the late run it opened redirected Roth more than it redirected others; no line of later novels can be shown to have turned on this one, and its manner was inimitable by design. Reach that belongs to the author’s career is not credited to the book. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the National Book Award for Fiction in 1995; a standing among critics, and among novelists who name it, as one of Roth’s greatest books; and its place at the head of the late run that followed, American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000).

Score: 8.2 / 10

Survival is weighed over thirty-one years, on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole, as published, and has stayed in print. Fabric: its surface is little fixed to its moment, since its periods, the street theatre of the 1950s, the war, a New England college town in the 1990s, are history by design. Presence is continuous among readers of serious fiction and in the criticism of Roth, and it is charged. The book is the one most often named in the case against Roth’s treatment of women; it is little taught because of its content; and since Roth’s death in 2018 his standing has been contested more openly than before. With presence charged on this book in particular, and narrower than a widely taught novel’s, the figure stands below the bar. Three decades demonstrate less than the centuries behind the summit.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Judged on Roth’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the long, propulsive sentence and of voice, and it is load-bearing: the prose moves from obscene comedy to elegy to self-prosecution inside a paragraph, and the turns are exactly timed. The opening sentence begins in the middle of a negotiation and sets the book’s terms in nine words; the last three sentences close on the reversal of a whole life in two questions and an answer. The set pieces are built at length without slack: the brother’s box, the funeral, the scenes at the Cowans’. The comic timing is as precise as any in American prose of the decade. Held below the top on three charges: the riffs repeat their mechanism and run past their work; the women other than Drenka, Roseanna above all, are drawn as functions of Sabbath’s need; and the obscene register, sustained, narrows the instrument it is meant to widen.

Score: 8.8 / 10

One law governs: every human act is a response to death, and the only choice is between lying about it and not. Take the two most distant elements: the street puppet act of the 1950s for which the young Sabbath was arrested, his finger reaching from behind the screen to a girl’s breast, and the old man wrapped in his brother’s flag. They obey the same law: transgression as the refusal of a world that permits death, and comedy and grief as one appetite. The law holds across a wide range, from farce at the Cowans’ to the cemetery at night, from a merchant seaman’s youth to a dying woman’s bed. Charged: the swings of tone are mostly held, but at moments the comedy is performance with no law under it, and the book’s refusal to judge its hero leaves some of its moral physics asserted rather than tested.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Many orders, held by one life. Consciousness, at its most exposed. The body, in sex, illness, arthritis, cancer and age. The family: a dead brother, a broken mother, two wives, one vanished and one drinking. History: the Second World War, a Jewish American childhood on the Jersey shore, the theatre of the 1950s, a college town in the 1990s, and in Drenka an immigrant’s Europe. Art, in the puppet theatre and its loss. Religion, in Jewishness and the yarmulke from the box. Death and mourning, everywhere. The natural order, in the New England hills and the sea he went to as a youth. They are integrated, not listed: each is a field of the same refusal. What holds the axis is the vantage and what is thin: the state and labour barely appear, the women’s lives are held from outside, and every order passes through one consciousness that admits no other at its own weight.

Score: 8.3 / 10