Warning: contains spoilers.
ST is brilliantly written. One of its main strengths is its mix of tone, register and genre. This in itself reflects Sabbath’s character: he quotes Shakespeare and has pornograhic phone sex; he speaks Italian and Spanish as well as English; he makes very articulate rants and soliloquies and knows all the four letter words. It reflects his exuberance at life. Precisely by switching registers so much, Roth forces you to know you’re reading a novel, but he carries it off so well – because of the energy of the character and writing, the humour and the narrative pace – that it never becomes simply annoying ironic self-knowing. It is also one of the dirtiest, sexually obsessed books I’ve read since Michel Houllbecq’s Atomised (though Atomised is sexual in a different way).
One of the best passages in the book displays this juxtaposition of registers and sexual frankness.
Lately when Sabbath suckled at Drenka’s uberous breasts–uberous, the root word of exuberant, which is itself ex plus uberare, to be fruitful, to overflow like Venus lying prone on Tintoretto’s painting where the Milky Way is coming out of her tit–suckled with an unrelenting frenzy that caused Drenka to roll her head ecstatically back and forth and to groan (as Venus herself may have once groaned), “I feel it deep down in my cunt,” he was pierced by the sharpest of longings for his late little mother.
Sex and death is the structure of the novel (or perhaps death, sex and death). It’s also Sabbath’s philosophy: ‘enjoy as much sex as you can because life is usually crappy and you could die at any time.’ It stems from the catastrophe his family suffered when his older brother died and it leads him to want to die when his lover dies. This isn’t so much Romeo and Juliet as exemplifying what Michel Houllbecq points out in Atomised, that people now view life as pain versus pleasure; as soon as the former outweighs the latter, it’s rational to want to die.
But Sabbath doesn’t know his own mind, and neither do we. This is partly because he doesn’t (e.g. when he faints he wonders whether he is doing it to fool Norm, or himself, or if it’s real?) but partly due to Roth’s free indirect style that blurs the distinction between author and character. Perhaps, in the end, he does want to be happy and all his misanthropy is an attempt to fool himself and everyone else. Sabbath’s theatre is not just the Indecent Theater of Manhattan but his whole life as a performance. That’s why he gets angry at Rosie and Christy being happy, that’s why he regrets not doing things with Drenka. That’s why he can’t kill himself: ‘everything he hates is here;’ and that’s the paradox: he loves life by hating it; he hates Rosie but can’t leave her; he hates the pain but can’t leave because that’s all you get. So he ends up being more like the character Fish than he realises, and not so close to Houllbecq’s half-brothers after all.
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