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To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, there is something about the imminence of death that wonderfully concentrates the mind. But what sort of concentration, and what sort of thoughts fill our penultimate hours? This is essentially the theme of Sabbath's Theater—a novel with all the creativity implied in that designation and also a biographical sketch of a man revealing his anguish and rage as well as his poignant longings for some emotional equilibrium and love. Roth brazenly offers a paean to life-affirming sexuality—a desperate attempt to battle with death and its sting in a frantic, hilarious disturbance of propriety that fills the pages of this drama. Freud's vision of the discontents of civilisation is dramatically played out in the insistent intrusions of sexuality on every page as Mickey Sabbath, the anti-hero of the volume, tries to hold on to the theatre of life with all its illusions. Sabbath as Dionysius, as seducer of the young, as Priapus, as Falstaff, leaps from the pages of this raucous, almost manic journey towards and from the grave. The following dialogue depicting Sabbath defending himself to the father of the young woman whose panties he had inadvertently stolen (read: parapraxis) reveals the counterpoint of the narrative that Freud also exploits in his description of the war between Eros and the necessary social constraints of civilisation.
‘What's awful?’ Sabbath asked. ‘The kids underpants wrapped around my dick to help me through the night after the day I’d been through? That's so awful? Come off it Norm. Panties in my pocket at a funeral? That's hope’.
‘And what do you live in?’ Norm inquired. ‘You live in the failure of this civilization. The investment of everything in eroticism, the final investment of everything in sex’ (pp. 344-6).
How closely does art follow reality and culture? How much of what our novelists write is taken from other writers in this age of communication? Although Roth grew up in a post-Freudian world, his anguished tale of the