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

In search of “more disastrous entanglement in everything”... Philip Roth in New York, 2010. Photograph: Eric Thayer/Reuters

Jude Cook

Tuesday 28 April 2015 - The Guardian

Readers are strangely proprietorial about the depraved Mickey Sabbath, the hero, anti-hero and villain of Philip Roth’s 1995 tour de force, Sabbath’s Theatre. Just what he does to deserve this affection over the course of 450 bile-filled pages is hard to fathom. He virtually defines that bête noire of creative writing courses, the unsympathetic character, and to discover such a monstrous creation on the page is a shock. Yet it is also a sweetly subversive experience - and this perhaps partially explains his appeal.

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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