“Either foreswear fucking others or the affair is over.” – first paragraph of Sabbath’s Theater
“And he couldn’t do it. He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.” – last paragraph of Sabbath’s Theater
In his National Book Award winning novel Sabbath’s Theater Philip Roth gives us a character with very little in the way of redeeming qualities. Roth’s reader cares about Ozzie or Zuckerman or Portnoy without having to be convinced. Sabbath, not so much. When I first bought Sabbath’s Theater, a group of friends had decided that we needed to have a book club where we read awesome new books. All of us were aspiring professional writers, and three out of four of us now teach college-level English, so we were not going to be put off by difficult text or characters. But then the group chose Sabbath. They stopped reading after a hundred pages. I did, also, but only because of peer pressure. Because, to be honest, I absolutely LOVE this book.
The question is, why would I (and the National Book Award committee) love this book? It, like most of Roth’s work, is a character study. And the character is horrid. But the world he sees – Sabbath’s ability to SEE, and to show the reader – that’s amazing. From the center of the novel:
[Sabbath] seated himself heavily on his haunches, pale, perspiring, breathless, while on her own Drenka took over the quest [to achieve thirteen orgasms in a row]. This was like nothing he had ever seen before. He thought, It’s as though she is wrestling with Destiny, or God, or Death; it’s as though, if only she can break through to yet one more, nothing and no one will ever stop her again. She looked to be in some transitional state between woman and goddess – he had the queer feeling of watching someone leaving this world. She was about to ascend, to ascend and ascend, trembling eternally in the ultimate, delirious thrill, but instead something stopped her and a year later she died.
Why does one woman love you madly when she swallows it and another hate your guts if you suggest she even try?
Wow. The sheer emotional intensity and beauty of this vision of Drenka – of “woman” in this powerful moment when she is celebrating life to its fullest. Then the shock of Sabbath’s crudity immediately following it. You want to share Sabbath’s vision – you want in his head – you want to see Drenka’s ascension – but you want to be able to jump out before he drops the next foul bombshell. And you can’t. You have to read every single word in Sabbath’s head. If you don’t, you fear you might miss the best ones.
The first line of the novel is a great example of what Roth does with the character through the entire book: “Either foreswear fucking others or the affair is over.” Here Roth gives us a character who would use the word “foreswear” in an actual sentence. But then to follow it with “fucking”! The way this line unfolds in the mind is nothing short of brilliant. As a single line, the sentence works poetically, unfolding verbal connections which the reader could not see coming. Yet when it becomes a complete line, the reader knows something valuable about the character telling us the tale. Much like Humbert Humbert’s first few lines ending with “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,” Sabbath’s line here shows the reader how his brain works.
It is telling that in a posting about a whole novel I would choose to focus on only a few lines. The density of the prose – the density of Sabbath’s thoughts – demands such close scrutiny. Zuckerman’s mind is growing, changing; it isn’t so full to bursting. And Portnoy is simply yelling at the top of his lungs – the thoughts are all verbalized for Portnoy, and therefore they take longer to express (as all our verbal thoughts take longer to “say” than the ones in our heads). Sabbath lives inside his own head. The rest of the world is his puppet show. I’m reminded of the line from the film Slingblade: “That Frank, he lives inside of his own heart. That's an awful big place to live in.” Sabbath’s head is a huge place to live, containing the entire universe of human sexuality.
About midway through the novel, Roth presents the reader with a puzzler – in a footnote he includes a transcript of a telephone conversation recorded and then broadcast to the world. Introducing the conversation, Roth says that numerous people would simply stop what they were doing and listen to this conversation for half an hour. And in placing it entire in the novel, Roth only uses half the page for the footnote – the top of the page is still the novel. This goes on for twenty pages. The reader checks out of the novel for twenty pages to read this footnote. And there is nothing in it that hasn’t been explained in the novel, except that the footnote is pure, unadulterated, sex. Porn. Flagrant Penthouse Letters kind of porn. There’s the beauty of Roth’s creation of Sabbath: What kind of person would record this exchange? What kind of person would say the things he says during the conversation? Obviously the perverted kind. This kind of character must be someone desperate to live – desperate to celebrate life through the perversion of his sexuality. But who wants to experience such a life secondhand? The other characters must be just like who? You? The reader? Can’t you just hear Sabbath laughing at you as you flip back twenty pages to find your place again?
After all, didn’t you stop to read all twenty pages of the pornographic exchange?
I know I did.
