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PARTISAN REVIEW
Before we go further, it may be useful to return to Amis for a moment.
In Amis's novel, Richard Tull has many ideas for books he will never
write. Here is Tull's sketch for one of them, "The History of Increasing
Humiliation":
It
would be a book accounting for the decline in the status and virtue
of literary protagonists. First gods, then demigods, then kings, then
great warriors, great lovers, then burghers and merchants and vicars and
doctors and lawyers. Then social realism: you. Then irony: me. Then
maniacs and murderers, tramps, mobs , rabble, flotsam, vermin.
Had Amis's fictional novelist seen this project through he might have
found full support for his thesis in Roth's Mickey Sabbath. Without any
preliminaries Roth introduces us to a "hero" who has turned his
longtime mistress Drenka Balich into a whore, has been "publicly
disgraced for the gross sexual harassment of a girl forty years his junior,"
and has all the while sponged on his wife, driving her to drink and
eventually into a psychiatric institution. All this in the first few pages of
Sabbath'5 Theater.
No time is lost in making everything clear. Sabbath
wishes to be seen at once as a self-appointed professor of the "lower
life," a man for whom "indecency" is a "dietary supplement," and whose
principle it is to be unprincipled.
Now it might be argued that it is awfully difficult nowadays, perhaps
impossible, to produce a fictional character who is capable of ruilling
modern readers. Even a character whose motto is "affront and affront
and affront" and whose chief delight is "to overawe and horrify ordinary
people" would have no easy time of it with a readership whose imagi–
nation has been
O.
J.-ed. This summer alone we have Congressmen in–
dulging in telephone sex with minors, and mothers drowning their chil–
dren because their boyfriends wish it, neighbors raping and murdering
infants, Serbs exterminating Bosnians. But as Roth knows only too well,
we still have our taboos, and even if those taboos have been inverted, it
remains possible to make a reader squirm. The sites where morality used
to dwell are empty, but they continue to smell of morality. Attacks on
feminists go a long way, and there are always irresistible combinations
like sex and death (men who masturbate on the grave of the beloved,
embalmers with that lustful necrophiliac look). And then there is pro–
scribed race-hatred Oap-bashing, at this solemn moment when we should
remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Add to this child-molestation, and
the abuse of vulnerable alcoholic women. Mickey Sabbath is equal to
