706
PARTISAN REVIEW
Illness, summer days spent at home, younger-brotherdom and con–
sciousness that just by being who he was caused anxiety and exaspera–
tion - and desperate fatigue - in his parents (he understood, even
when times were very bad, that it was not him they hated but the
things inside him that made him cough and smolder and eilloresce,
and cry at night after dreams had left him inconsolable; he
was
incon–
solable; he could not be consoled): all this had made Marco more
vigilant, more sensibly watchful, than a six-year old would normally
have need or reason to be. Adults were not other to him. Not remote
and massively autonomous and alive only insofar as they maintained
his domes of pain and pleasure. He knew that adults, too, were small,
and pushed and tugged by many forces. Marco knew grownups. Very
often he hung out with them all day and all night long . .. .
Marco's sensitivity seems to increase in direct proportion to the
static in his father's life . When he is not brooding about his "secred
idendidy," the kid is focusing all his energy on daddy's troubles. Alert
and inventive, Marco performs the tasks of comfort and consolation. For
he has discovered his
telos :
"Helping Daddy, in whatever he does. Each
day." (His childish efforts to serve his dad's needs are subject to gross–
and often hilarious - misinterpretation by Richard.)
So there
is
one sympathetic portrait in this novel. You can't help
but love this kid.
He
seems to me to be the non-postmodern-decadent
center of the novel. And so I suggest that the reader bear in mind the
following questions, as he hacks his way through the urban jungle un–
dergrowth of this book: Will Marco too end in the dismal swamp of
nihilism? Suppose that Marco and Scozz were to meet - would the lion
lie down with the lamb? It's worth finding out.
Seasoned sophisticates who are proud of having "seen everything"
have been put to the test by Philip Roth. I have heard them respond to
the extracts from
Sabbath 's Theater
printed recently in
The N ew Yorker
with epithets like "Drugged-out madman!" "Misogynist!" "Porno–
grapher!" Just wait until they see the rest of the book.
Try this on: The book's principal figure, Mickey Sabbath, is rooting
around for dirty pictures in a young girl's dresser drawers:
