The Rantings of a Modern-Day Lucifer : SABBATH’S THEATER, <i> By Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin: $24.95; 451 pp.)</i>

Odd copulations are part of witch and demon folklore, where goats and other beasts join with human partners under the auspices of Satan. We hadn’t realized it, but all this time Philip Roth has been setting up a modern equivalent.

Who would have thought that young Portnoy’s celebrated exploit with a hunk of raw liver would turn out to be not masturbation but procreation? Yet here, full-fledged, repellent, fascinating and fearfully long-winded, is the offspring: Mickey Sabbath, a former puppeteer, an obsessive white-bearded seducer and a reverse alchemist who consistently turns the gold of human possibility into the lead of a mono-maniacal ego. Finally, after Nixon in “Our Gang” (a splashy dry run) and Zuckerman (a prince of light or of darkness and fortunately you’re never sure which) Roth has got his demon down cold.

Following literary tradition and his own, he has given the devil the best lines. Very fine too, many of them. They are also just about the only lines, and there are many of them. By the time this Lucifer completes his fall, it is hard to hold on to the suggestion that at the start he was an angel. Samuel Johnson, constrained to admire “Paradise Lost,” remarked nevertheless that “no one ever wished it longer than it was.” Not that 450 pages is necessarily long, but it is long for one hand to be clapping.

And of course Sabbath (as in witch’s sabbath --nothing in Roth is there by chance) uses his hand for something very different from clapping. In one of the early acts that win him a small celebrity, he mimes the trial and execution of a middle finger by the other fingers, which end up stuffing the offending digit into a tiny meat-grinder.

The 62-year-old Sabbath’s aggressive confessional monologue is, in a sense, an expansion of the finger act: He is at once his own culprit, his own judge and his own would-be executioner. It is not an ear he seeks, though, but an audience. There is a difference. An audience is a target--in this case, an entity to be assailed, shocked, amused and abused into a participation that leaves it not purged but complicit. The clown does the pratfalls but somehow the bruises are imprinted on the backsides of the spectators. It is in the line of the lacerating New York solo comics; Sabbath could be Jackie Mason on amphetamines.

Sabbath’s account begins in the present, when he is 62, and moves through several days of climactic horrors; at the same time it rampages feverishly back and forth through a past that is even worse.

Drenka has suddenly died of cancer. She had been his partner in 13 years of unbridled adultery that was Wagnerian in its Sturm, its Drang, and its claim to have reformulated the art. Arthritis has long since prevented him from performing puppet theater. A sexual scandal with a student at the Upstate college where he taught put an end to his job there. Nikki, an actress who was his first wife, disappeared years before. He is supported by his second wife, Roseanne, an alcoholic and then a recovering alcoholic, with whom he lives in a state of mutual loathing.

Indifferent to her drinking--he had his nights with Drenka--he can’t abide her reform. She speaks in the jargon of recovery, using such tags as “sharing” and “comfortable with,” and she enunciates the doctrine of letting it all out: “You’re as sick as your secrets.” “Wrong,” he snarls, “you’re as adventurous as your secrets, as abhorrent as your secrets, as lonely as your secrets, as alluring as your secrets, as courageous as your secrets, as vacuous as your secrets. . . .” Finally fury takes them both over: Her throat clogs, his loosens. Desperately, she tells him that shouting is irrational. “Shouting is how a Jew thinks things through,” he screams.

Thus far, he is a more or less recognizable Roth character: Jewish, incandescently argumentative, an emotional sadomasochist, a lover and tormentor of Gentile women. He is sex-obsessed, God-obsessed--God as the laws of life that stand in the way of Sabbath’s limitlessness--and preemptor of all arguments, including those that tell him how awful he is. He will tell you first; you won’t have that satisfaction.

But Roth has swollen his normally out-sized, brilliant and intolerably self-immured protagonist into something monstrous and unhinged. Corrosiveness becomes dementia. Mourning Drenka, he regularly visits her grave at night and ejaculates on top of it, darting away only when other former lovers arrive for the same purpose. Transgressor of all dispositions, including literary--he is contemptuously obsessed by James Joyce and scornfully imitates him for several pages--he insists that the grave is not a fine and private place, and that you do, too, embrace there.

He lures his college student into an exchange of pornographic phone calls, tapes them, and gives us 10 pages or so of the transcription. (In their brute detail they make Nicholson Baker’s similar but cleverer “Vox” into a Harlequin romance.) When one is misplaced and broadcast on the college radio--thus losing him his job and sending Roseanne into nervous breakdown--he flays the blubbering, lustful student in a scene of verbal sadism that is as repellent as it is clever.

His account moves into the present for its three-day climax. After a last quarrel with Roseanne he runs away to New York, determined to kill himself. Wandering the Bowery, he monstrously lectures a black panhandler: “You people were free long before we were. We did not have your advantages.” When a rich friend takes him in and offers to help him get back on his feet, Sabbath steals his daughter’s underwear for sniffing purposes, tries to seduce his wife--for once Sabbath has a mature and intelligent interlocutor, and the results are brilliantly funny--and makes off with $10,000 and some nude snapshots she had hidden away.

He shops for a burial site in the decrepit New Jersey cemetery where his family is buried, dealing with a jovially bent cemetery manager descended directly from Hamlet’s first gravedigger. Sabbath is in competition with Shakespeare as well as Marvell and Joyce.

It is death that deranges him, that turns solipsism into madness. It is not the process or the extinction but the loss of control. His parents have escaped him by dying; so has his beloved older brother, Mort. So has Drenka. His recollections of his New Jersey childhood are suddenly nostalgic, and Roth supplies them with tender and vivid detail. But it comes too late to be affecting; it comes as one more of Sabbath’s manipulations. So does a deathbed scene with Drenka in which his graphic recollections of kinky sex--genital, oral, anal and excretory--try for sentiment and achieve copro-kitsch.

Suicide would allow him to cheat death out of its control, but the ending is less neat than that and more ironic. We are not rid of Sabbath so easily. Lucifer fell from pride and pride, unfortunately, is unable to die. Sabbath is also unable, but Roth, who cannot make his protagonist immortal and probably does not intend to, has made him interminable.