Why Sabbath's Theater gets better after the first section

And as I recalled (see yesterday's post), Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater (1995) gets a lot better once we're past the ridiculously salacious first section in which the priapic protagonist, the 64-year-old retired puppeteer Mickey Sabbath, mourns the loss of his "mistress" of 14 years, Drenka. There''s almost nothing good, interesting, or appealing about Sabbath or about any of the writing in the first section; but after a closeout scene in which Sabbath pays a final visit to Drenka's gravesite (where he sees one of D's many other lovers who gets clobbered by D's son, a state trooper and S realizes the trooper thought he was clobbering S) he takes off for NYC. Here we learn much of the history of Sabbath's strange life, and the novel really gets going: mother seriously depressed over the loss of her older son in WWII (covered in the only good part of the first section), Sabbath becoming a merchant sailor and then a part of the avant-garde theater movement in NY circa 1955, first marriage to Nikki, a talented actor, philandering, Nikki leaves him (perhaps after learning of his infidelity) and disappears, presumed dead but Sabbath desperately searching for her, marries Roseanne, an artist who becomes his partner in puppet theater, suffering alcoholic who at present is deeply involved in AA, Sabbath sarcastic as always completely contemptuous of her absorption in recovery etc., he picks a fight, then leaves. He's headed for NY because he received a call from one of his compatriots in the old days of theater who reports that another of their colleagues has suffered depression and killed himself; Sabbath off to join the funeral. Stays w/ the friend, whom he hadn't seen in 30 years, the friend a success, highlight Sabbath's failure and unconventional appearance; puts S up in daughter's bedroom (shes off as a freshman at Brown), a big mistake as S begins to fetishize various items in the girl's room: photos, vaginal cream, even the toilet seat. Again, we are repulsed by Sabbath - but at least by this point we understand some of the horrors and tremors of his life; these do not excuse his terrible relationships with women (nor explain why he attracts to many women, either), but they help us understand his destructive pathology. In a great passage that begins bottom p. 142 Sabbath himself summarizes the failures of his life.

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