At the age of sixty-two, Philip Roth ought to have outgrown the role of enfant terrible, but he insists on giving it the old college try. His exhibitionism has a didactic streak. He’s flashing us for our own good. Although the slick promotional brochure for Sabbath’s Theater[1]pictures Roth looking distinguished and debonair, like a Dewar’s Profile of the man of letters at leisure, the message of the book itself is that this literary success still hosts a wild man within. His latest antihero and designated sinner, Mickey Sabbath, is a horny geezer with a white beard. “Ascetic Mickey Sabbath, at it still into his sixties. The Monk of Fucking. The Evangelist of Fornication.” Catching his estranged wife shacked up with a younger woman, he thumps his chest and roars like Tarzan the ape-man, shaking the entire house. A puppeteer in the Indecent Theater who missed his shot at the mainstream when he declined a job offer from Jim Henson ages ago (he ruefully notes that he “could have been inside Big Bird all these years”), Sabbath is a countercultural has-been hampered with arthritis—a condition symbolic not only of the artist no longer able to practice his craft but of the control freak losing his hold. Which doesn’t stop him from trying to manipulate the other characters through a series of malicious pranks and head games (such as the nasty and labored humiliation of his mistress’s husband). The herky-jerky movements of this book may be