Philip Roth, Sabbath's Theater

timpanis & graveyard visits

“But horrible things are happening to people all the time.”

Seventy-eight pages into Sabbath’s Theater — Philip Roth’s craziest, darkest, and maybe best book (he thought so) — comes my favorite chapter-break in literature.

But to understand what’s so great about this chapter break — how it is that any chapter break, which is the literary equivalent of a rest in a piece of music, could come to seem more precious, more impressive, than any of the virtuosic note-flurries leading up to or away from it — you have to understand what reading Sabbath’s Theater is like. Which is: imagine listening to a symphony while crouched beside the timpani. (Or maybe inside the timpani?) Imagine standing on the deck of a boat at night while it bashes its way through a typhoon.

Put more generously: what distinguishes Sabbath’s Theater — what Philip Roth loved so much about it — is that it is free. Every doubt, every impulse to self-censor — even the wise ones — he gleefully ignored. Paragraph after paragraph, page after page, the book rushes over you, enveloping you in every dark and hilarious and obscene thought that Roth has ever had. And this envelopment is thrilling — but it’s also punishing. When you see, from the expanse of white space, that one of the book’s remarkably few breaks is coming, you crawl toward it, gasping, desperate to catch your breath.

And at no point in the book are you gasping more desperately than at the end of the second chapter of the first section. Mickey Sabbath, the book’s hero (or anti-hero, or whatever he is) has been marching around the cemetery where his sex-crazed ex-mistress, Drenka, is buried, losing his mind with grief. And masturbating. Naturally, masturbating.

In fact, Sabbath isn’t the only one of Drenka’s ex-lovers who felt moved to go masturbate by her graveside that night — a guy named Lewis is there too. So Sabbath scares Lewis off, picks up the semen-drenched flowers that Lewis left atop the grave, and proceeds to spend the next few pages recalling a conversation he and Drenka once had about the time she had sex with four men in one day (have I mentioned that this is a profane book?). 

By the time Sabbath is chanting “I am Drenka! I am Drenka!” and licking Lewis’s semen off of his fingers (!), even the hardiest of Roth-devotees might well be considering flinging himself from the deck. “Something horrible is happening to Sabbath,” Roth writes, redundantly, closing the chapter. And we’re left shuddering, staring into the middle distance, wondering if we have any P.G. Wodehouse novels lying around.

But then, out of curiosity, we turn the page.

“But horrible things are happening to people all the time.” A sentence given its own paragraph. Almost flippant, given the extent to which we’ve been immersed in Sabbath’s suffering. Sabbath may be Drenka, this sentence tells us, but Roth (mercifully) isn’t Sabbath.

And then Roth launches us directly into the current of a new story — this one not about semen, not even about Sabbath, but about the suicide of one of his oldest friends. The novel’s aperture, which has spent the past ten or twenty pages closing to an almost unbearable extent, has suddenly opened. The shift comes as an enormous, almost physical relief. (That the story of a suicide comes as a relief tells you something about the book.)

But Roth doesn’t merely manage a hairpin shift in dynamics with this sentence. He also, even more importantly, reassures us that he is in control of this great galumphing monster of a novel. The novel might have seemed out of control, to have lost touch with good taste and even sanity — but Roth hasn’t. The symphony crashes and bashes and shrieks and stomps— but the conductor, with a scarcely perceptible shift of his baton, brings the orchestra to silence. And with that silence, brief as it is, he forces us to reconsider the recent cacophony, to re-hear it for what it was: music.