Sabbath’s Theater. by Roth, Philip - 1995

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995. First edition of Roth's second National Book Award-winning novel. Octavo, original half cloth. Boldly signed by Philip Roth on the title page. Fine in a fine price-clipped dust jacket. Jacket design by Milton Glaser. Mickey Sabbath, the hero of the novel makes a concerted effort to be bad. Like Alexander Portnoy, the famously self-abusing character in Roth's 1969 novel Portnoy's Complaint, Sabbath has an appetite for "acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus." But while Portnoy's antics were usually comical and liberating, Sabbath often feels imprisoned by his own acts of self-indulgence. Though his frantic pursuit of sex is a desperate attempt to abate his anxieties about death, it only serves to obliterate any semblance of real life he could have had. A great work...Roth's richest, most rewarding novel, funny and profound, as powerful as writing can be" (The New York Times Book Review).