AGING DISGRACEFULLY

By R.Z. Sheppard

MORRIS (MICKEY) SABBATH is a 64-year-old former puppeteer with a prostate gland that belongs in the urology hall of fame. In addition, the randy creation of Philip Roth's new comic novel, Sabbath's Theater (Houghton Mifflin; 451 pages; $24.95), is an Olympic-class misanthrope, an example of homo invectus so addicted to wrath that he rejects suicide on the ground that "everything he hated was here."

The origins of Sabbath's outrage lie scattered among his failures and stubborn refusal to understand why he is not loved and rewarded for his disorderly conduct. He once had a street act in New York City in which his magic fingers casually unbuttoned a young woman's blouse. The police failed to appreciate the artistry. He also missed the gravy train when he turned down a ground-floor offer from Muppets creator Jim Henson.

Mickey Sabbath could have been Big Bird. Instead he is spending his closing years in rural Massachusetts nursing resentments and his ragged individualism. His sole and meager support comes from his wife Roseanna, an Alcoholics Anonymous member who nearly drank herself to death for typically Rothian reasons: "because of all that had not happened and because of all that had." Chief among them were Sabbath's neglect and his affair with Drenka Balich, the lusty wife of the local Croatian innkeeper.

Is this a Jewish-style version of John Updike's best-selling Couples? An X-rated take on Isaac Bashevis Singer, who long ago quietly introduced readers to the subject of senior-citizen sex? Or is Roth's 21st book a strategically scandalous novel by a first-rate writer in a second-rate literary culture who needs another commercial success like Portnoy's Complaint to justify his advances? The issue is certainly complicated, but the fact remains that Roth has changed publishers as often as Dave Winfield has switched teams--and for the same reasons. Management gets tired of paying for past performance, but there is always a new front office that needs long-ball potential.

Sabbath's Theater demonstrates that Roth still has the power to shock and amaze, although it doesn't have the fresh manic energy of Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a novel that capitalized on the then popular literary subjects of Jewish Americans and psychoanalysis. The paganized, foul-tempered Mickey Sabbath is beyond all that. Some readers will find the material and language too scabrous for their taste. Others will have their own reasons to cry foul. Roth's old adversaries in the suburban Sanhedrin should have no beef: Mickey is not bad for the Jews; he is bad for everybody. But orthodox feminists will be driven nuts by Drenka the Insatiable, and the Japanese will be offended by Mickey's ravings against a defeated enemy's celebrated prosperity. "In his grave, Franklin Roosevelt is spinning like an atomic dreydl," he cries in a two-page riff about raw fish and "the Land of the Rising Nikkei Average."

Artistic license has expired on shtick like that, and further critical explication of the separate realms of fact and fiction can no longer insulate the comedy from the offense . But the sexual obsession and obscenities are intrinsic to Sabbath's exaggerated character as a dirty old man. There is much humor in what makes us uneasy, and Roth extracts it, as he has done for nearly 40 years, with a technique and verbal flair unmatched by his contemporaries. Sabbath the houseguest rummaging through a teenager's underwear drawer or attempting to seduce his host's wife is the sort of baggy-pants antic that a young Philip Roth probably enjoyed in Newark, New Jersey's long-gone burlesque houses. Readers may remember one of them as the place where Alexander Portnoy discovered an unconventional way to break in his baseball glove.

Sabbath is saved from slapstick by his desire to find relief and wisdom in his past. He comes closest in a conversation with a 100-year-old man who once delivered vegetables in Mickey's old neighborhood. Getting the spirit of the aged on paper has become something of a sub-specialty for Roth--notably in Patrimony, his tender and unsparing account of his father's life and death. The encounter between Sabbath and the centenarian is reminiscent of the earlier memoir.

Nostalgia, on the other hand, is not Roth's strongest suit. Sabbath's memories are frequently weakened by his untransformed self-pity. Furthermore, his return to scenes of childhood has an autobiographical tinge that clouds the distinction between the author and his creation: the shameless, self-destructive rebel who wants to be remembered as a "Beloved Whoremonger, Seducer, Sodo mist, Abuser of Women, Destroyer of Morals, Ensnarer of Youth." There should be no confusion between Sabbath the puppeteer and the novelist who pulls the strings. Of course, there will be.