710
PARTISAN REVIEW
this and to every other challenge. Now why on earth, you may already
be wondering, should I wish to praise an author who declares himself
ready to pierce the armor of a public that considers itself beyond
provocation?
Bear with me.
From the age of seventeen when Mickey shipped out as a merchant
seaman on the "Romance Run" (whores at every port), and when later
he becomes a puppet master and director of "The Indecent Theater of
Manhattaq," the well-muscled, green-eyed, cocky rebel has opted for
anarchy - "simply for the fun of it." His "sexed-up and lawless" ways
make him "thrillingly alien" even to his friends. Although he is anything
but a faithful and loving husband, when Mickey's beautiful and fragile
actress wife Nikki suddenly vanishes, things begin to go badly for him.
This is a loss he cannot absorb (much like the loss that ruined his moth–
er's life when her eldest son Morty went down during the Second
World War). Every woman in Manhattan exists to remind Mickey of
Nikki's disappearance. And so he turns his mistress Roseanna into his sec–
ond wife, and the pair go into exile - settling in a town called
Madamaska Falls. This is where Roth's story begins, a full thirty years
after those heaving, emotional Manhattan days. Things now have gone
from bad to worse, and Sabbath has become a confirmed failure - fat,
ugly, arthritic, old. But he is more outrageous than ever. He still thrives
on "making people uncomfortable, comfortable people especially."
Madamaska Falls has offered certain diversions: each year in his pup–
pet-workshop there have been coeds to seduce, and in his mistress
Drenka he finally discovers his female double - a woman who wouldn't
hear of "self-righteously suppressing the satanic side of sex." (Such a slew
of sibilants you seldom see!) To disintegration Mickey has put up no re–
sistance - or as he phrases it, Roseanna has turned to drink while he has
turned to Drenka.
Such is Sabbath as midlife ends. He has been pleased with the way he has
blustered and blundered and bullied his way to clarity. The quest for
clarity demands that restraint, limitations, taboos be kicked over,
violated. Even the Commandments are thrown upon the compost heap
of desire. It has been Mickey Sabbath's strategy to inure himself "to the
limitless contradictions that enshroud us in life." He takes pride in being
the last of the realists, a man with "a full understanding of what is going
on." Sexual excess, satisfying his "most vital need," has been at the center
of his high-energy, God-is-dead, all-is-permitted existence. He, however,
is no simple satyr. Crippled, he makes up for his lost dexterity with
verbal ferocity. Much thought and eloquence have gone into the ex–
istence he has devised for himself
