Sabbath's Theater - Philip Roth

In which we follow the life of Mickey Sabbath, puppeteer and thoroughly shameless dirty old man. The style is familiar to Roth readers - the basic facts are laid out early on in the narrative and the blanks are then filled in throughout the rest of the book in a dizzying series of flashbacks and timeshifts.

The prose is as spectacular as ever, but the emphasis on lust in the first half of the book is wearying. The second half is stronger, with the focus shifting to aging and mortality, and ultimately the riotous tone is modulated into something rather more affecting.