More great writing from Roth - but about an insufferable character

Again noting that in Philip Roth's 1995 novel, Sabbath's Theater, we see some of his best writing ever and some of his, I won't call it "worst" because as an exemplar of literary style Roth is almost always at the top, but let's say most perverse writing, to wit: the protagonist, Mickey Sabbath, invited to spend the night at the home of wealth friends in Manhattan and put up (improbably) in bed of daughter who's away at Brown and allowed (improbably) free reign of the house in the a.m. when everyone else is out at work, spends an hour or so rummaging through all of the young girl's belongings in search of sex photographs (a bit of quaintness there, as today he'd need to find only her phone or her log-in). The catalog of her possessions is like a valuable archeological document, something future generations (god help us) might read to know what life was like in a particular time and place as signified by material possessions. It's truly a tour de force of Rothian writing - as is a later lengthy passage as Sabbath roams the streets of NYC, esp the Lower East Side, where he formerly had an experimental theater, and we get a terrific picture of a time and place a seen through one man's consciousness - it was a time when NY was at its nadir, filled w/ crime and corruption - seems a long way back now in an era when rents are phenomenal even in remote Brooklyn and Queens - in a Joycean manner, as Roth actually slyly tips his hat to JJ in the midst of this "stream of consciousness." Great writing - yes - but in the process creating a character who rummages through a teenager girl's belongings and, in a later passage when PR goes so far as to provide a lengthy (and sexy, it must be admitted) transcript of a sex tape, involving a 60-year-old college prof and his 20-year-old, naive, immature, vulnerable student. Despite all of Sabbath's pleas for understanding - she was of age, she was a willing participant, everyone's out to get him, he's only following his natural instincts, and so on - it is impossible to sympathize with, and therefore to care much about, this perverse, suffering, insufferable character.

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