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 won the National Book Award for fiction in 1995. Sabbath is an unproductive, out-of-work, former puppeteer with a strong affinity for whores, adultery, and casual sexual exploits. He takes great pleasure in being the prototypical "dirty old man". In addition, he enjoys manipulating the people surrounding him, mainly women, as he in the past did with puppets. The loss of his decades-long sexual sidekick, the equally adulterous Drenka, precipitates a crisis in a life he has long considered an utter failure. Sabbath wonders whether he should just end it all, 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. Roth modeled his protagonist on the American Jewish painter R.B. Kitaj.[1] Literary critic Harold Bloom has declared Sabbath's Theater Roth's "masterwork."[2]
References
- ^ Nesvisky, Matt. "In-Your-Face Outsider", Jerusalem Post, November 8, 2007.
- ^ Bloom, Harold (2003). Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. New York: Warner Books, p. 207.
| Works by Philip Roth | |
|---|---|
| Fiction | |
| Goodbye, Columbus • Letting Go • When She Was Good • Portnoy's Complaint • Our Gang • The Great American Novel • My Life As a Man • Sabbath's Theater • Everyman | |
| Kepesh Novels | The Breast • The Professor of Desire • The Dying Animal |
| Zuckerman Novels | The Ghost Writer • Zuckerman Unbound • The Anatomy Lesson • The Prague Orgy • The Counterlife • American Pastoral • I Married a Communist • The Human Stain • Exit Ghost |
| Roth Novels | Deception • Operation Shylock • The Plot Against America |
| Non-fiction | |
| Memoirs | Patrimony • The Facts |
| On writing | Shop Talk • Reading Myself and Others |
| Collections | |
| Zuckerman Bound • A Philip Roth Reader | |
| Library of America | Novels and Stories 1959-1962 • Novels 1967-1972 • Novels 1973-1977 • Novels 1979-1985 |
