{"id":144002,"date":"2023-11-15T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-11-15T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/misplaced-energies\/"},"modified":"2024-01-10T18:57:51","modified_gmt":"2024-01-10T23:57:51","slug":"misplaced-energies","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/misplaced-energies\/","title":{"rendered":"Misplaced energies"},"content":{"rendered":"
It’<\/span>s a good thing Philip Roth has died; otherwise he would surely be canceled. Points for courage, then, to John Turturro, who
\ncowrote and stars in a defiantly cancelable one-act stage adaptation of Roth’s intentionally offensive 1995 novel Sabbath’s Theater<\/span> (at the Pershing Square Signature Center through December 17) that luxuriates in its source’s most shocking scenes. Though Roth (1933–2018) approvingly chronicled the spread of sexual license, since his era the heterosexual lust of aging men for much younger women has widely been ruled contemptible, or in the parlance of twenty-first-century feminist columnists, “gross” or “problematic.” If sexual preoccupation was at the very heart of the American novel in the 1960s and ’70s, when Roth, John Updike, John Irving, and Norman Mailer expounded on their every horny thought, it is somewhere between quaint and incredible that Roth won the 1995 National Book Award for fiction for Sabbath’s Theater<\/span>. That prize is, like most others, now circumscribed by an unwritten anti-quota against white men (the last pale male to win it, in 2015, was Adam Johnson, although he is part Sioux), and today Roth would not only fail to capture awards for such a book, he could also expect severe critical scoldings and perhaps mass walkouts from the woke young women who currently form the infantry of the major publishing houses. That Roth’s protagonists tended to be fairly close cognates of their creator would today be seen as additional justification for tying him to his work and damning the lot.<\/p>\n