The Odysseyan voyage of Mickey Sabbath in Roth's Sabbath's Theater

The last section of Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater (1995) is about the best Roth has ever written, a beautiful, funny, and emotionally draining visit by the troubled and unlikable protagonist, Mickey Sabbath, to his home town on the Jersey shore, ostensibly to buy a grave site near his parents' and the omit suicide. The visit to the rundown graveyard and his purchase of the plot is a terrific scene, especially the passage in which Sabbath walks among the graves and reads each of the inscriptions - like a prose poem of Yiddish ancestry. Then Sabbath drives around the old neighborhood and is shocked to discover that his cousin Fish is still alive and living in his old, now rather decrepit, house. The visit to Fish, whose memory surges in and out like a tide, is a heartbreaking passage, as Sabbath desperately tries to draw forth memories and make connections. Sabbath leaves with a box of mementos left by his mother, mostly materials from brother Morty who dies in WWII and whose death pretty much destroyed the family - and led in part to Sabbath's dark cynicism and need for attention. Sabbath gets his comeuppance of a sort when he drives back to his home in the Berkshires and endures some difficult encounters, which I won't divulge, with his wife and, later, with the family of his late lover Drenka. By the end, Roth almost has us feeling sympathetic for this nasty character - quite an achievement in itself - and, like him or not, all readers who make it to the end (450 not-small pp) will feel like we've passed through a gauntlet - almost like an Odysseyan voyage that, like the original (and like Joyce's take, which Roth gives a nod to at one point) ends at home w/ much changed and much learned, or at least endured, en route.

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