Sabbath’s Theater.

ROTH, Philip.

Item Number: 22014

Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995.

First edition of Roth’s second National Book Award-winning novel. Octavo, original half cloth. Signed by Philip Roth on the title page. Fine in a near fine 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).