There is something to this charge, and the novel is stronger for allowing readers to consider the hero in such terms, if they choose. But it would be a mistake to do so exclusively, for that would involve foreclosing on the sympathies we give to the outrageous Sabbath when, in a section of 60 pages, the heart of the novel and one of the great sequences in American fiction, he returns to the Jersey Shore of his boyhood. Now, still alive, Sabbath finds that his conversation with old Fish draws him ironically and painfully toward life as, in a rush of memory, everything comes back. The ocean had finally carried it away. The Atlantic is a powerful ocean.
Death is a terrible thing.
That's a doctor I never heard of. Yes, that's the word for it. It was all remarkable. In Roth's new theater it feels as if the lights were about to be extinguished for good, and that's unsettling. Philip Roth seems to me to be saying something similarly terrifying and exhilarating about American life in 1995.