Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Baddies in books: Mickey Sabbath, Philip Roth's supernova of sin

The antihero of Roth’s 1995 novel Sabbath’s Theatre blinds us with his astonishing misogyny, his exponential misanthropy, his audacious nihilism - and yet he makes us care

Philip Roth in New York, 2010.
In search of “more disastrous entanglement in everything”... Philip Roth in New York, 2010. Photograph: Eric Thayer/Reuters
Here is a baddie with scale, mythical in his magnification. And yet he is no Pilate or Iago, merely a sad old man with a hard-on, raging against the dying of the light. Just as with Macbeth, the more flagrant Sabbath’s transgressions, the more we are dazzled by his outrageous glare. He’s a supernova of sin, or a Roman candle, at the very least, blazing away in Roth’s virtuoso paragraphs; blinding us with his astonishing misogyny, his exponential misanthropy, his audacious nihilism. How does Roth pull it off? (The expression is apt.) Or more accurately, how does he pull it off and still make us care?

For those not familiar with the novel, Sabbath is a puppeteer and disgraced academic in mourning for the death of his libidinous mistress, Drenka, “a conventional woman who would do anything”. Her enthusiasm was convenient, as Sabbath had decided to defy his own imminent demise by attempting to have as much sex as possible.
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