Minnie the Minx wrote:
I finished this yesterday after being pretty gripped by it for a few weeks. Unlike my reaction to Roth's other main characters, I found myself increasingly disliking Sabbath - his utter self absorption, his disgust for emotional intimacy, the way any intimacy he did foster inevitably ended in grubby sperm events, his emotionless dissection of everyone who had tried to love him/ hadn't loved him, his empathy bypass, his endless cock gazing as though his penis had been his only friend. I got to the end of the book finding no redeeming features in him whatsoever. I was waiting to find some, to end on a high. That high didn't come.
Beautifully written, mind you!
That's one of Roth's best, in my opinion, it has to be difficult to write a book where the protagonist is so consistently repellent, yet make it thoroughly engrossing. Irvine Welsh with an understanding of properly beautiful prose. Also, in the literary-heavyweights writing about puppeteers league, it's way ahead of Salman Rushdie's terrible Fury.