Craft Essay #3:
Sabbath’s Theater
In a recent profile of Ian McEwan in The New Yorker, McEwan tells how Philip Roth attempted to help him with an early novel by spreading the manuscript out on the floor. If we were to do this with Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater, we’d find the novel falls into several sections, each structured differently (and not always separated by chapter breaks): 1) Drenka; 2) NYC-A; 3) NYC-B; and 4) Home. Section 1 is the most virtuosic of these, and thus the most interesting to me as a writer. For an idea of its complexity, let’s examine the opening pages (pp. 3-17). The bold first sentence: “Either forswear fucking others or the affair is over”—is a paraphrasing of the ultimatum delivered to Mickey Sabbath by his lover, Drenka. Then, for the next 14 pages, Roth’s third person narrator flits from one topic to another, a long digressive burst that introduces characters, sets up relationships, and dips deep into Sabbath and Drenka’s past—all with such a command of language that we are sucked into the novel’s dark, funny, debauched world. This exhilarating digression begins with the unspooling of three increasingly long sentences, sentences as sensual and plump as Drenka herself, labyrinthine sentences that establish the themes of sexual obsession and fear of mortality. Does the narrator then return to the scene where Drenka demands “adulterous monogamy?” No. Instead, we are introduced to Sabbath’s wife, Roseanna, and Drenka’s husband, Matija; we are escorted to the Grotto, the wooded area where Sabbath and Drenka meet for sex; we’re given even more history of Drenka and Matija; and then we get details about Sabbath’s arrangement of a three-way with Drenka and a hitchhiker. And we’re still only on page 7! For ten more pages the narrator bores into both Sabbath’s and Drenka’s present and past, from the death of Mickey’s brother in World War II (from which their mother never recovered) to Drenka’s symbiotic relationship with her state trooper son, Matthew. Also included are brief references to Sabbath’s former career as a puppeteer for the Indecent Theater of Manhattan. We do not return to Drenka’s ultimatum until page 17, and then only after we learn that Sabbath has been regularly speaking to his dead mother, who, he believes, has returned “to take him to his death.”
The first section jumps back and forth in time, settling down only when Sabbath travels to New York for a friend’s funeral (around page 125, which marks the beginning of section 2). In lesser hands, or at least in hands with less technique, this structure would collapse under it own weight. But Roth is in complete control. Like his master puppeteer protagonist, the narrator deftly moves his characters around the stage, both in space and time, distracting with one hand while preparing for a sucker punch with the other.
Why has Roth chosen this fractured structure for the second section? Why not employ a more linear narrative, as he does later on? Why not more leisurely, scene-like flashbacks, perhaps even separated by line breaks or chapter headings?
First, it is a clever and effective way of providing back story. We receive a generous amount of information in a short space of time, so that when we are finally plunged back into the scene, we really know Sabbath and Drenka. More importantly, this dizzying bit of time travel reveals Sabbath’s state of mind. At 64, he is resisting the tug of mortality by clinging to the life rafts of sex and memory. Like a patient on a therapist’s couch, Sabbath, via the narrator, follows a stream of consciousness that, however digressive, is always revealing. It’s also important that this first “scene”, which the narrator smashes open like a box full of memories, culminates in Drenka’s revelation that she’s gravely ill (she’s dead by page 33). Even more reason to grasp for that life raft!
Section 2 (pp. 125 to 185), in contrast, is almost entirely tethered to the present, and is less interesting for it (in my humble opinion). Section 3 (pp. 189-351) is a more traditionally structured combination of present and past, with longer scenes and plentiful dialogue. It’s as if Sabbath, geographically removed from his late lover and wife, feels less boxed in (interestingly, he also stops conversing with his dead mother). There is less sex to be had, even in the flashbacks (not that Sabbath doesn’t try), and less resistance to the pull of mortality.
The novel’s final section is dominated by two remarkable, dialogue-heavy scenes, one in the present (Sabbath and Fish, p. 380), one in the past (Sabbath and the dying Drenka, p. 415). These and other scenes in this last section are not interrupted by the sort of digressions that run rampant in the novel’s first 100 or so pages, and so finally allow us to get close to what Sabbath has been dodging: “He had arrived at the loneliest moment of his life” (p. 438).
This evolution in the structure of the sections—from chaotic digression to longer, more penetrating scenes--is echoed by Roth’s evolving use of the third person narrator. This narrator is so close to Sabbath that that I kept picturing him (definitely not a her!) as a little devil on the man’s left shoulder, listening to his innermost thoughts and guiding us through his “turbulent inner talkathon.” As the novel progresses, the narrator tries on and discards various formats, including a brief foray into Joycean stream of consciousness (p. 195), as well as journal entries (p. 263), letters (p. 408), and imagined obituaries
(p. 191).* Early on, he also occasionally lapses into first person. With each successive section, as the narrative settles down, the line between third and first person blurs, and the narrator merges with Sabbath for longer and longer stretches. Why not write the entire novel in the first person? Is Sabbath too sex-obsessed, too depraved, even for Philip Roth to give voice to directly? Is Sabbath too much like the author? In the novel’s final section, when the narrator slows down to record the two remarkable scenes with Fish and Drenka on her deathbed, we finally understand how lonely Sabbath really is. At that point, the novel is as much a first person narrative as not. We are inside Mickey Sabbath.
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