If Chaucer's Wife of Bath had been a male Jewish sexagenarian, she might have sounded a lot like Morris ``Mickey'' Sabbath. He's the lustful egomaniac whose breakneck chutzpah powers Roth's brilliant new novelhis funniest since the palmy days, so to speak, of Portnoy's Complaint. Sabbath was once a notorious puppeteer, whose ``Indecent Theater'' performances evinced ``an unseemly, brilliantly disgusting talent.'' Now aged 64, on the outs with the wife who bores him (and supports him), Mickey vacillates between clinging to life and preparing for death. He recalls those who needed him or fed his various hungers, including his first wife, Nikki, a beautiful cipher who simply walked out of his life one day and never reappeared; his dead mother, who endured the majority of her years mourning the death in wartime combat of Mickey's older brother Morty; and his dead mistress Drenka, a sexual athlete whose exploits moved him to cheersall the people he has loved, hated, exploited, abused, and lost. Effectively exiled from his upstate New York home, Sabbath wanders to Manhattan for one old friend's funeral, moves in with another (whose wife and daughter he schemes to seduce), survives the mean city streets' dangers (in a rude and hilarious parody of Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet), and repeatedly performs an act of typically Rothian homage at Drenka's gravesite. There's a delirious, exhilarating grandeur in the mad old man's defiant refusal to mourn or regret, his visceral determination to squeeze every drop of pleasure out of every experience still within his reach. Death may beckon, but, as Mickey Sabbath keeps blissfully rediscovering, ``Something always [comes] along to make you keep living, goddamnit.'' No writer since Henry Miller has depicted sex as the driving force of life with such a scintillating combination of wit and heat. Roth here creates one of contemporary fiction's great charactersand manages the Herculean feat of containing him in a savage, spectacular novel that may well be his best. (First printing of 150,000; $150,000 ad/promo)

Those who feel that Roth's last few novels, brilliant as they often were, have been excessively cerebral and self-referential, can relax at the prospect of his latest. For this is Roth in full sardonic, outrageous cry‘a sort of Portnoy for a later generation, gonads miraculously intact, but with an overlay of hard-won wisdom, celebration and regret. Mickey Sabbath is an elderly relic of the diabolical young puppeteer who was once arrested for coaxing a young Columbia student's breast out of her blouse with the sheer effrontery of his insinuating performing fingers. Now, living in obscure poverty in New Hampshire with a wife who's in aggressive recovery from the alcoholism to which he has driven her, he is reviewing his life‘and continuing to act on his remarkable principles, which exemplify what one of his few remaining friends calls ``a remarkable panegyric for obscenity.'' He has had a deliriously erotic relationship with Drenka, the concupiscent wife of a local Yugoslavian innkeeper, and her sudden death from cancer quite undoes him. His involvement with a student at a college where, unwisely, he had been hired to teach theater arts led to an erotic phone-sex tape that is being widely bootlegged; and when he goes to New York to attend the funeral of an old colleague, he ransacks the dresser drawers of his indulgent host's teenage daughter, reveling in her saucy underthings and seeking the risqué Polaroids he knows all young girls keep somewhere; he also does his best to seduce the man's wife. Not, one would think, a sympathetic subject, and at first Mickey's overwhelming misanthropy and obsessive eroticism make the reader uneasy. Soon, however, Roth's insidious skill at deeply involving the reader in a seemingly alien world begins to work its magic. Mickey's memories of the death of his cherished older brother in WWII and his growing up on the Jersey shore; a visit he pays to a centenarian uncle; and the way he picks out a grave in the ratty Jewish cemetery where his family is laid‘these are passages that could only be the work of a master novelist, profoundly funny, poignant and human. By the time Mickey has said goodbye to Drenka, in one of the most moving‘and perverse‘deathbed scenes in literature, then been arrested by her policeman son for lovingly urinating on her grave, it is clear there is nothing Roth cannot accomplish‘and somehow turn into a seriocomic affirmation. This is a book that will shock and delight in equal measure, the summit of a remarkable literary career. Major ad/promo. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Roth's National Book Award-winning novel is a hilarious, beautifully written spoof about an aging puppeteer who finds himself rudderless when the death of his mistress, Drenka, effectively removes the driving force of his life: sex. Mickey Sabbath, now resigned to preparing for his own death, toasts all of the formerly significant figures in his life, including his first wife, who walked out on him; his mother, who was consumed by the death of Mickey's older brother during the war; and the nubile Drenka, whose appeal for Mickey's sexual fealty shortly before her death falls upon deaf ears. David Dukes reads this rip-roaring tale with a sensitivity that complements Roth's well-wrought prose. Recommended for all serious fiction collections, but advise your patrons to listen with the car windows up and the volume down.‘Mark Annichiarico, "Library Journal" (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

This is Roth's twenty-first novel and displays all the Rothian concerns and stylistic quirks his readers have grown accustomed to, only more exaggerated. It is a long, long book, but it grows on you. Morris "Mickey" Sabbath, once a lewd puppeteer who claims that he could have been inside Big Bird "instead of Caroll Spinney" if he had just been civil to Jim Henson, is a short, fat, white-bearded man with startling green eyes whose life is a series of lewd insults and wicked gestures, committed, undoubtedly, to mask his suffering. Still, Sabbath is a difficult character to empathize with, for Roth, it seems, has foisted on him every sexual fantasy and perverse dream that he (Roth) has ever had. And why? Because what we have here is a book about love and death. And Mickey is in extreme pain. He inherited his mother's inability to accept the death of a loved one. His descent into depravity began with the death of his brother, a pilot who was shot down in World War II, gathered even more force when his first wife, the beautiful Nikki, vanished, and culminated with the death of his lover, whose grave he pisses on to show his defiance. Alex Portnoy-oy-oy-oy-oy is approaching death, and whistling some Gershwin on the way. (Reviewed July 1995)0395739829Bonnie Smothers