BOOKS
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warmed on the fading coals of Sabbath's nihilistic fire, do not dismiss the
man. He has more to tell you. More serious developments in
Sabbath
'5
Theater
will reward your patience. Roth has not solicited your attention
in order to bait the middle class, or if you prefer, to give you yet
another free spirit raging against the degenerate creature called by
Zarathustra the "last man."
Sabbath's defense of the "lower life," his delight in being the
"town-polluter," his goal of achieving "unrelenting frenzy" with
Drenka, are for a time a source of "solace and satisfaction," yet the abyss
is there, waiting, yawning. The comic expression of what has happened is
in Drenka's first utterance - the sentence with which the book begins:
"Either forswear fucking others or the affair is over." Drenka has sud–
denly been "seized by the taboos." It isn't long before the reader learns
that her uncharacteristic demand for fidelity is no absurd whim - she is
dying of cancer. And with the expectation of death, "their whole carnal
edifice" caves in.
Oddly enough for a novel classed as pornographic, the book begins
with Mickey's realization that for him sex games are all but over. At the
end of a life devoted to lust something else comes to take its place, and
for the first time Sabbath has a sharp awareness of what that something
is: "Nothing but death, death and the dead ... " He has had some in–
timations already that there is more to existence than adultery and fini–
tude. For like his beloved older brother Morty, who died in the War,
"he'd grown up on endlessness and his mother." And nihilism be
damned, there had been no denying that their mother had a soul:
Sabbath felt something close to veneration for that natural sense of a
destiny she'd enjoyed and, too - in a woman with as physical a life as
a horse's - for the soul embedded in all that vibrating energy, a soul
as unmistakably present as the odorous cakes baking in the oven after
school.
The cruel deaths of brother, mother, father; the disappearance of Nikki,
had long stood as sufficient proof for Mickey that his childhood vision
was false: "endlessness is the fantasy, and finitude the fact." I'm going
to
argue that
Sabbath
'5
Theater
is about Sabbath's recovery (possibly
temporary) of this vanished childhood premise. Ferocious Mickey is
going to put up a fierce resistance against the reemergence of the soul,
of the infinite, and of certain primal feelings. And who is the opponent
he will fight? The counter-arguments come from the mouth of Mickey's
mother's ghost. She will appear to her wayward boy at the most
