My Amazon review of Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth (Rated 2): Can a Great Writer Make a Boring Character Interesting? – Philip Roth is one of my favorite authors, yet I’d never read this winner of the 1995 National Book Award for fiction. Alas, I shouldn’t have done so now. Even Roth cannot make the sex-drenched misanthropic puppeteer Mickey Sabbath come to life. He means his title character to be transgressive; he is merely unimaginatively obsessive. Save the brilliant section where Sabbath visits the Jersey shore of his childhood, and the family memories scattered throughout, there is little to redeem the novel’s self-indulgent writing. Was I shocked? No, merely bored.
