 Front cover of the first edition | |
| Author | Philip Roth |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Otto Dix,Sailor and girl, 1925 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Houghton Mifflin |
Publication date | 1995 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Pages | 451 |
| ISBN | 0-395-73982-9 |
| OCLC | 31970961 |
Sabbath's Theater is anovel byPhilip Roth about the exploits of 64-year-old Mickey Sabbath. It won the 1995 U.S.National Book Award for Fiction.[1] The cover is a detail ofSailor and Girl (1925) by German painterOtto Dix.
Mickey Sabbath (modeled after American Jewish painterR.B. Kitaj[2]) is an unproductive, out-of-work, formerpuppeteer with a strong affinity forprostitutes,adultery, and the casual sexual encounter. Sabbath takes great pleasure in his status as the prototypical "dirty old man." He takes an equal pleasure in manipulating the people around him, primarily women—in a sense, they play the same role as his puppets. The loss of a decades-longwingman—the equally depraved Drenka—precipitates a crisis in a life he has long considered an utter failure. Sabbath wonders whether he should simply take his own life, thereby heeding the advice of the ghost of his departed mother, a frequent visitor who urgessuicide as the fitting end for his failed life.
Literary criticHarold Bloom has declaredSabbath's Theater Roth's "masterwork."[3] Prominent literary criticJames Wood toldThe Morning News, "I am a great fan ofSabbath’s Theater, it was an extraordinary book."[4]New York Times criticMichiko Kakutani found it hard to finish and "distasteful and disingenuous".[5]
It won theNational Book Award for fiction[1]—thirty-five years after Roth'sdebut novelGoodbye Columbus won the same award (1960). It was also a finalist for the 1996Pulitzer Prize.[6]
After Roth's passing,The New York Times asked several prominent authors to name their favorite Roth book.Claire Messud pickedSabbath's Theater, writing: "The novel, outrageous when it was first published is all but inconceivable today; which is part of what makes it literarily important. Roth fearlessly embraces the ugliness of the aging degenerate, withDostoevskian zeal. He manages to do so with such wit and in such pyrotechnic prose that this reader, at least, doesn’t hurl the book across the room."[7]
In 2023, theSignature Theatre Company put on a stage version ofSabbath's Theater at the Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre of thePershing Square Signature Center, anoff-Broadway theater. The play was adapted from Roth's novel byAriel Levy andJohn Turturro, with Turturro starring as Mickey Sabbath. The play was directed byJo Bonney.[8][9][10]
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