MORRIS (MICKEY) SABBATH is a 64-year-old former puppeteer with a prostate gland that belongs in the urology hall of fame. In addition, the randy creation of Philip Roth's new comic novel, Sabbath's Theater (Houghton Mifflin; 451 pages; $24.95), is an Olympic-class misanthrope, an example of homo invectus so addicted to wrath that he rejects suicide on the ground that "everything he hated was here."
The origins of Sabbath's outrage lie scattered among his failures and stubborn refusal to understand why he is not loved and rewarded for his disorderly conduct. He once had a street act in New York City in which his magic fingers casually unbuttoned a young woman's blouse. The police failed to appreciate the artistry. He also missed the gravy train when he turned down a ground-floor offer from Muppets creator Jim Henson.
Mickey Sabbath could have been Big Bird. Instead he is spending his closing years in rural Massachusetts nursing resentments and his ragged individualism. His sole and meager support comes from his wife Roseanna, an Alcoholics Anonymous member who nearly drank herself to death for typically Rothian reasons: "because of all that had not happened and because of all that had." Chief among them were Sabbath's neglect and his affair with Drenka Balich, the lusty wife of the local Croatian innkeeper.
Is this a Jewish-style version of John Updike's best-selling Couples? An X-rated take on Isaac Bashevis Singer, who long ago quietly introduced readers to the subject of senior-citizen sex? Or is Roth's 21st book a strategically scandalous novel by a first-rate writer in a second-rate literary culture who needs another commercial success like Portnoy's Complaint to justify his advances? The issue is certainly complicated, but the fact remains that Roth has changed publishers as often as Dave Winfield has switched teams--and for the same reasons. Management gets tired of paying for past performance, but there is always a new front office that needs long-ball potential.
Sabbath's Theater demonstrates that Roth still has the power to shock and amaze, although it doesn't have the fresh manic energy of Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a novel that capitalized on the then popular literary subjects of Jewish Americans and psychoanalysis. The paganized, foul-tempered Mickey Sabbath is beyond all that. Some readers will find the material and language too scabrous for their taste. Others will have their own reasons to cry foul. Roth's old adversaries in the suburban Sanhedrin should have no beef: Mickey is not bad for the Jews; he is bad for everybody. But orthodox feminists will be driven nuts by Drenka the Insatiable, and the Japanese will be offended by Mickey's ravings against a defeated enemy's celebrated prosperity. "In his grave, Franklin Roosevelt is spinning like an atomic dreydl," he cries in a two-page riff about raw fish and "the Land of the Rising Nikkei Average."