The Penitent

27/11/2025

Literature    Download PDF  

A Tiring Tirade

 Is the main figure in The Penintent, Joseph Shapiro, a narrator we can trust, and when finding a narrator untrustworthy, are we making a general claim or simply regarding their values as questionable to us? Here are some of Shapiro’s remarks. Of many Western women in America: they “dress like sixteen-year-olds, drink like sailors, curse like streetwalkers and whose alleged love is in fact sheer hatred. It’s no wonder that so many modern men become impotent or homosexuals. You have to have queer inclinations in the first place to marry one of those.” Shapiro also reckons, “one holy book says that even when a person is on his death-bed, Satan comes and tries to lure him into atheism and blasphemy. There is far greater knowledge of mankind in this statement than in all the ponderous volumes of all the Freudians, Jungians, Adlerians.” In the next chapter, he speaks of Sartre’s philosophy: “which no one understands since it is so vague and full of contradictions.” Shapiro returns to his earlier point later, saying, “when a man sleeps with a modern woman, he actually gets into bed with all her lovers. That’s why there are so many homosexuals today, because modern man is sleeping spiritually with countless men. He constantly wants to excel in sex because he knows that his partner is comparing him to the others. This is also the cause of impotence, from which many suffer.”
      Where to start with such claims? First of all, noting that Shapiro is not the narrator and that the book is a second-person account, even though the first person is evident almost all the way through. Second-person stories are rare: Jay McInernay’s Bright Lights, Big City, Ian Bank’s Complicity and Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, and it can be a good way of creating, as Banks’s title suggests, a complicit relationship between reader and writer. Yet The Penitent doesn’t quite feel like such a book, nor is it a homodiegetic account where the narrator isn’t the main character, as in The Great Gatsby and, to a less pronounced degree, Heart of Darkness. In both books, the narrator is vividly first-person, while the narrator in The Penitent is far more nebulous. Halfway through, at the end of the first day of this two-day account, Shapiro says, “Oh, it’s late! It’s time I went home. If you want to hear more of my story we can meet again tomorrow.” The narrator says, “Yes. I do. Let’s meet tomorrow.” When Gerard Genette differentiates between heterodiegetic, homodiegetic, and autodiegetic narration, he notes that the first offers a narrator who tells the story but who has no role within it, the homodiegetic narrator has a role but not the central one, and the autodiegetic narrator is the main figure in the story they tell. Sentimental Education is heterodiegetic, The Great Gatsby homodiegetic, and Catcher on the Rye, autodiegetic. If Shapiro were our narrator, we would be in an autodiegetic novel; if the barely present narrator had a greater role to play as they tell the story, the novel would be heterodiegetic. But so passive is the narrator that we know nothing about; we read the book almost as a simple first-person novel.
     In such a first-person account, we could insist the narrator isn’t someone we are supposed to take seriously, as we’re more inclined to regard highly Sartre and Freud’s thoughts over Shapiro’s. Shapiro offers an opinion but not much of a justification, and when the reader is put in a position between uninterrogated assumption and two of the 20th century’s most respected thinkers, why wouldn't we choose to view Shapiro as ignorant and keep our distance? In a first-person book, this would usually fall under unreliable narration, yet this is complicated by Shapiro telling the story to someone else, but whose perspective on this man we know nothing about.
     We will have more to say on Shapiro’s remarks, but for the moment, let us provide some narrative context. Joseph is a married man who takes up with a mistress and discovers he wants neither to remain with his wife nor continue the affair. He wishes to escape the decadent West and flies to Israel via Rome, wishing to become a religious man. We know he succeeds not because of anything the narrator says but through what Shapiro tells him and us. “Sometimes pious Jews with beards earlocks, and hats just like this I’m wearing now came to my office asking for donations of yeshivas.” However, as he tells his story, admits he had a sexual assignation on his way to Rome, was tempted again when he sees the woman in Jerusalem and isn’t shy in offering a prejudice throughout the two days he speaks, the bliss of faith is often absent. If Shapiro has become a man of God, the Lord is a judgmental one, with the book full of the sort of prejudices we have opened with.  
   Perhaps IB Singer’s novel wants to be a religious work yet paradoxically so: rather than doubting Joseph’s faith, we might doubt whether such a faith is worth having if it manifests itself in recrimination and self-recrimination — in Shapiro attacking those who live differently from how he does now, and how dismissive he is of his former life. When he speaks of women who sleep around and men who can’t find a decent woman to love and become homosexuals, this isn’t a live-and-let-live philosophy, but one insisting any other way of living beyond strict Orthodoxy is decadent and futile, purposeless and prurient. You can come away from the book assuming that, whatever belief Shapiro has in God, he has almost no faith in humans. Yet that isn’t quite true: he admires the woman who leads him to think of other women who drink like sailors and curse like streetwalkers. He is invited over to eat with the head of a yeshiva, the Jewish academy for Talmudic learning, and finds in her the traditional woman he felt no longer existed. “…This pious woman had long since accepted the onset of age as part of the honour of being a mother of grown children, a mother-in-law and a grandmother. Her eyes reflected the goodness of the true Jewish mother, not the mothers mocked in books and plays, and who American-Jewish writers and some psychoanalysts consider the source of their children’s nervous afflictions.” He also falls in love and marries a young widow, the older woman’s daughter: “She looked no more than eighteen, but I later learned she was twenty-four. One look sufficed to tell me a lot about her: first of all, that she was a rare beauty, not the kind fashioned in beauty parlours, but the beauty and charm that’s given by God.” She will become the mother of his children, giving her father the grandchildren he was worried he wouldn’t have, having lost one child to the 1948 war that established the Jewish state, and two that died young, leaving only this daughter, whose husband died six months after the wedding.
      There are then a few people Shapiro loves, but they are more products of God than they are of society, and the book is centrally about a man who rejects society and is determined to find faith. This, however, isn’t quite the same thing as saying this is Singer’s message. The writer claims, “when I write about a character I will say that he looked so and so and behaved so and so, but I won’t say he was a good man. Sometimes I read writers who say their characters are “noble” men. To me this is ridiculous. If the man was truly noble this should come across from what you tell about him. It’s up to the reader to judge.” (Commentary) Shapiro tells us what to think of people all the time: he describes his lover’s daughter as a “brute”, and “had the face of a murderer”, and calls people sitting in Israeli cafes “idlers”. Shapiro also has numerous opinions which take the form of the broadest generalisations. “Every new invention demands countless new victims. The automobile has already killed millions of people. The Airplane, too, is an angel of death.”  “When it comes to animals, every man is a Nazi” he says, as he discusses a person eating ham and eggs, later adding, “I ate meat, but a shudder ran through me each time I reminded myself how meat becomes meat.” He also admits that he bought his lover a fur coat, ‘with what rapture and enthusiasm she stroked the fur of those butchered animals. How she poured out praises for skins torn from the bodies of others!”  
         If we are supposed to distance ourselves from this narrator within the narration, what type of distance is required? Should we find him a pub bore lifted onto the page, a reactionary whom Singer ironically presents all the better to tell the reader that living in society, with its meat, its fur coats, its lovers, and its cars and aeroplanes, isn’t so bad? But many a reader who might not care for numerous Shapiro remarks will say they are vegetarian too, and admit there are too many cars on the road, planes in the sky and that wearing fur is disgusting. It isn’t so easy to mock a narrative figure who may share many of our beliefs. When Shapiro dismisses modern women, reckons Sartre makes no sense, and attacks recent technology, the reader might take him less seriously than when he speaks of murdered animals and the ability to become ever more decadent once we start to act badly: “I recalled what I learned as a boy: if you broke one of the Ten Commandments, you would break them all.” However, Singer would appear to seek neither complicity nor irony; instead insists the reader find in the work the ambivalence of their relationship with the world and with faith. It isn’t so much that the work wants us to believe in God and expect from us the moral rectitude that Shapiro tries to practise, but wishes for us to muse over the question in the first place.  
    Though it is commonly now assumed that if a writer has something to say, and has to add a few words in a forward or afterword, the book hasn’t quite managed to convey its intended meaning, we might wonder why so many 19th-century writers offered introductions, while many in the 20th century have made themselves available for interviews. Singer was often interviewed, and also, in The Penitent, provides an afterword in the form of an author’s note, written specifically for the English language edition. Here, he tells us that the novel was first published in The Jewish Daily Forward in 1973, a Jewish American newspaper with which Singer was closely associated. The Penitant was published in book form a year later, in Yiddish and then in English in 1983. In the afterword, Singer talks about giving an interview to the New York Times in 1979. Anybody who read the book and several years afterwards read the interview might well wonder if the words he offered in the novella were repudiated by the thoughts expressed when speaking about it, where Singer said that while he “believed in God and admired His divine wisdom, I could not see or glorify His mercy.” “My candid answer is that Joseph Shapiro may have done so, but I haven’t. I’m still as bewildered and shocked by the misery and brutality of life as I was as a sixteen-year-old child…To me, a belief in God and a protest against the laws of life are not contradictory.” He describes Shapiro as an angry man and an extremist.
       Singer’s note may be there to reassure the reader, but the gap between the narrator and Joseph is there formally within the text, however minimally. While many a book with a homodiegetic narrator will allow themselves to say a few words describing their life and experiences, the narrator in The Penitent is described only very elliptically by Joseph, when Shapiro says, for example, “I’m a few years younger than you.” If a reader were to infer who is Singer here (the unknown narrator or the very known Shapiro), it would be better to assume, were we to make such a claim at all, that the younger person referred to is Singer rather than Shapiro: that the unknown narrator is more inclined to be the author’s alter-ego. It makes sense to presume that if we know nothing about a narrator and a lot about the person telling a story to them within a text, then the former will resemble the writer, and the latter simply be a character inside the text. The narrator is, after all, the figure to whom the story is told and who has related it to us with minimum intrusion. A greater intervention would have made it more clearly homodiegetic, and the narrator’s absence altogether, autodiegetic. But part of the book’s interest lies in the gap, one that could easily be ignored but shouldn’t be underestimated.
       First-person books needn’t be taken as autobiographical even if they are autodiegetic. However, a book that announces the tiniest gap between the telling and our reading makes that fact unequivocal. Yet as Joseph Sherman says, no less a critic than Harold Bloom assumed that Singer is ‘’speaking to his readers directly through the mouth of Joseph Shapiro, and is advocating a strict return to religious Orthodoxy as a solution to the problems of modern Jewish identity and survival in an increasingly secularized and faithless world.’’ Sherman adds, ‘’In the light of Singer's often-repeated objections to twentieth-century worldliness, recorded in many interviews, this is an understandable assumption. It has been shared by many casual readers of the book, who are offended by Shapiro's unremitting hatred for the world and all its works…” (The Journal of Narrative Technique)
   One way of reading The Penitant is as an exploration of the alter ego as extremist, with the writer taking aspects of his predilections and preoccupations and exaggerating them in narrative form, all the better to understand positions he may potentially take. Were John Updike or even (the Jewish) Saul Bellow to write The Penitent, few would assume The Penitent to be either writer, just as if Singer were to write Couples or Herzog most critics wouldn’t draw comparisons. But Singer is very much a Jewish writer of faith, someone who says in interviews that “I always pray to God (and I do pray because I am in my way a religious man), don’t give me any power over any other human beings. I have always avoided this kind of power like the plague.” (Commentary) He also reckons, “from experience we know that it happens often in this world—I’m not speaking now of the next world—that evil is victorious. Wouldn’t you say that Hitler’s success was the triumph of evil? Certainly, he almost reached his goal. And those Germans who went along with him, in his evil ways, have not been punished.” These comments aren’t too far removed from Shapiro’s when he says: “that’s the nature of adultery — it demands boasting. Among men and women both. This is actually true of all crimes. Many criminals have been caught and sentenced because they boasted. The reason for this is that crime actually provides little pleasure, not even physical pleasure. You have to enhance this pleasure through boasting.”  
    But it isn’t that Shapiro sounds like Singer; more that Shapiro sounds like a Singer character, just as Herzog sounds like a Bellow one and Richard Maple in the short stories sounds like an Updike figure. A writer’s characters may resemble the writer, but much more often they will resemble one another, helping to create that particular universe we know as the writer’s world. If Zola’s characters resembled Camus’ and Flaubert’s Proust’s, their world would no longer be a world. They would collapse into each other, even if we might suppose that Bellow and Phillip Roth (as Jewish writers) might have more in common with each other than with Updike, while Updike might share a few similarities with Richard Yates and John Cheever. What matters isn’t that the writer writes about themselves but that they create selves which generate a world that distinguishes them from the worlds of others. When we propose that Singer’s statement isn’t too far removed from Shapiro’s, it rests on the degree to which he is a Singer character, more than he happens to be indistinguishable from the author.
  Yet no doubt in a writer’s work, some characters would seem more closely to resemble the writer than other figures in it. When Flaubert insisted he was Madame Bovary, it carries an anomalous provocation, while if Singer said he was Shapiro, Updike, Maple or Roth Zuckermann, it would seem more like a confession. However, this isn’t because the writer and character are one and the same, but the gap between them isn’t insurmountable. All it would take in Singer’s part is a hardening of opinion; in Flaubert, it would have required a sexual transition. However, Madame Bovary is as forcefully a Flaubert character as Shapiro is Singer’s — the issue is more one of the epicentral, perhaps a more useful word in this context than the autobiographic. Reading The Penitent, we can find many Singer preoccupations, and too, most especially, the moral meeting the spiritual, with Shapiro not just happy finding faith, but also condemning society, insisting on the two coming together. He wants to believe in God, certainly, but this could have been a tale about a man who finds faith without any need to comment on the social; just as someone could be disillusioned by people without needing to bring God into things.  
   Often, Singer does bring God into his other work through supernatural forces meeting moral irony, or through the complications of faith meeting no less great complications in life. In the story ‘Zeidlus the Pope’, the central character gives up his worldly goods and converts to Catholicism, all the while trying to become holier still, yet is seen to move further away from God as pride rather than lust or money proves to be his sin. In the novel, Enemies, A Love Story, the hero of the book believes his wife has died in the camps, and so he marries a woman he doesn’t love, moves to the States and takes a mistress, before realising his first wife is still alive. All the while, godly questions sit behind the book. But, usually, there is a stronger moral assertiveness than in most writers, whether Singer relies on the supernatural or not, whether the devil is so obviously manipulating things as in ‘Zeidlus the Pope’, or whether it is no more than a voice in the person’s head as we find in The Penitent. When Shapiro tells the narrator that “The Evil Spirit has been silenced, but I knew he would regain his tongue”, Shapiro may believe in the devil, but that doesn’t mean the reader has to, even in the context of the story. In ‘Zeidlus the Pope’, the tale hinges on the devil’s handiwork; in The Penitent it need be no more than a psychological conflict inside Shapiro’s head as he tries to be a good Jew. We see this when the Evil Spirit says, after Shapiro decides he will marry and devote himself to his new wife, “all this would be fine if you were a true believer, but actually you are nothing more than a heretic affected with nostalgia. You will soon turn back to your heretic ways, and what’s more, you’ll bring nothing but grief to a pious Jewish daughter”. This needn’t be any more than the doubts of someone trying to hold onto precarious faith. But the presence of this voice still functions much more strongly than we would expect in other post-war American writers focusing on characters going through self-doubt, whether it be in Bellow’s Herzog or in Roth’s The Dying Animal.
        This rests partly on many post-war Jewish writers accepting their cultural background but resisting the religiosity it might seem to entail. Though Bellow says he believes in God, he also insists, in the very paper Singer so often wrote for, that “my mother was extremely religious while my father avoided the subject. I’ve often wondered if in realitythis concealed an unresolved problem, and I’ll confess to you that I’ve never reached a definite conclusion.” (Forward) Roth reckoned, “I'm anti-religious. I find religious people hideous. I hate the religious lies. It's all a big lie.” (Guardian) Singer has always been unequivocally a believer, even if he has no interest in the fanatical. “I believe in God but not in man insofar as he claims God has revealed himself to him. If a man came to me and tells me he has been to the planet Mars, I would call him a liar, but I would not stop believing in the existence of the planet. I believe that the Higher Powers do not reveal themselves so easily; you have to search for them.” (Commentary) Yet his work is permeated by faith as no other Jewish writer of his time, and steeped in a tradition that most readers won’t know, but might sense: “I’ll tell you, I feel myself naturally a part of the Jewish tradition. Very strongly so!” Singer might add, “I wouldn’t say I feel myself a part of the Yiddish tradition. Somehow I always wanted to write in my own way, and I never felt that I was somebody’s disciple. For instance, Sholem Aleichem, who was a great writer, always used to say that he was a disciple of Mendele Mocher Seforim.” (Commentary) Nevertheless, reading his work, we are likely to see his interest in magic, superstition, the devil, and prophecy as reflective of a tradition. In the work of Bellow, Roth, Mailer, and even Bernard Malamud (probably closer to Singer in style and preoccupation than the others), we cannot. It is as if his belief in God is contained by a cultural faith that allows for neither the ambivalence of Bellow nor, of course, the atheism of Roth, but demands that Singer interrogate both God and society. He can believe in God and live in society, but that is a marrying of opposites Shapiro cannot quite tolerate. He must live initially to the full in society, and live no less fully his retreat from it into conservative Judaism. Shapiro moves from the life of an American bourgeois with a wife and a mistress, into a faith that condemns the decadence of his prior worldly existence.
      Since Singer has usually been better writing close to the further reaches of the spiritual over the material pleasures and benefits of America (Bellow has very much been the opposite), it would make sense that critics reading The Penitent would see Shapiro echoing Singer’s views over Singer using Shapiro to contextualise the complexity of his own. Bloom reckons, “the voice is indistinguishable from Singer’s…and there is no way to read this book except as Singer's tirade.” (New York Times) Bloom notes too that in The Penitent, Singer adopts a trope he commonly used: a fan comes to the well-known writer with a story he has to tell, and the difference in the novella is, for Bloom, that Shapiro has no story, only a jeremiad. Bloom isn’t entirely wrong, but he ignores the conceit and sees Singer taking straight what Bellow in his work would present satirically and often through a minor character. “Here is Singer/Shapiro in the kind of monologue that in Bellow would be deliberately satirical” (New York Times) as he quotes passages we have quoted above about a pure, decent woman providing far more gratification than all the refined whores in the world.
     Yet perhaps in this instance, Singer goes one further than Bellow, turning categorical satire into indeterminate irony, asking that we don’t take Shapiro seriously but that we oughtn’t to mock him either. To satirise a character is to mock not just the character but usually the underlying beliefs they possess, while indeterminate irony can allow for the undermining of character without dismissing the claims a character makes. Shapiro may be self-righteous, bigoted, self-absorbed and whinging, but he also captures within his hectoring despair a problem that many will agree with if not in quite the form he offers it. As Shapiro says, “thank God, I had lived long enough for the Jews to have found their own home…you saw with your own eyes what licentiousness led to: The KGB, The Gestapo. If you don’t want to be a Nazi, you must become the opposite,” and also reckons that “I am absolutely convinced that so long as people shed the blood of God’s creatures, there’ll be no peace on earth. It’s one step from spilling animal blood to spilling human blood.” These are Zionist and Vegetarian beliefs that many share, even if they might express them in less vociferous ways than Shapiro. Were someone to say it is important Jewish people have a land of their own after what happened in the camps, this needn’t mean that one believes licentious behaviour in Germany, Poland and Russia led to the creation of those camps. Equally, many are vegetarians without quite equating an animal’s loss of life with a human’s. Singer isn’t satirising Zionists and vegetarians, though he is asking us to distance ourselves from the character even if we might be sympathetic to some of Shapiro’s views. When we opened by wondering what to make of Shapiro’s remarks, we wished, first of all, to establish a technical relationship with them: to try and comprehend who the narrator happens to be and how relatively absent he is within the work. We know nothing about his private life and almost nothing about his own views except as an interjection. He interrupts Shapiro’s monologue early on to say that “…you must have faith that everything stated in the holy books was given to Moses on Mount Sinai. Unfortunately, I don’t have that faith.” Shapiro asks why he says “unfortunately” and the narrator replies: “Because I envy those that do.”
     This is an important distinction between the narrator and Shapiro. Shapiro is assertive; the narrator doubting, and had Singer offered satire over indeterminate irony, he would have placed us dispositionally in Shapiro’s place, no matter if we might have been taking an antithetical view on his position. The reader would be as certain as Shapiro, even as we mocked his beliefs. Better surely to be in a state of indeterminacy over those beliefs, partly because of the certitude in their expression, and extract from the book a place in between, one that leaves us in the sort of doubt the narrator alludes to rather than  a satirical counter-assertiveness that leaves us mocking Shapiro. Bloom knows exactly what to make of the book and rejects it as a failure because it didn’t present events satirically, regarding the only good passage, one where Shapiro is trying to have sex on the plane while flying from New York to Rome. It is a funny account, but extended to the length of a novella, it would have been tiresome, while Shapiro’s monologue is tiring. But at least the latter allows us into the head of a man we should take seriously, rather than in the mind of one who is no more than the butt of an author’s ridicule. The Penitent becomes a perplexing work, and this may be why Singer felt the need for the afterword: to say that he can take a character seriously without sharing his disposition, and finding in the man’s assertions the indeterminacy of his own beliefs. As Singer says, “the agonies and the disenchantments of Joseph Shapiro may to a degree stir a self-evaluation in both believers and sceptics. The remedies that he recommends may not heal everybody’s wounds, but the nature of the sickness will, I hope, be recognised.” (The Penitent) Clearly, it wasn’t.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

The Penitent

A Tiring Tirade

 Is the main figure in The Penintent, Joseph Shapiro, a narrator we can trust, and when finding a narrator untrustworthy, are we making a general claim or simply regarding their values as questionable to us? Here are some of Shapiro’s remarks. Of many Western women in America: they “dress like sixteen-year-olds, drink like sailors, curse like streetwalkers and whose alleged love is in fact sheer hatred. It’s no wonder that so many modern men become impotent or homosexuals. You have to have queer inclinations in the first place to marry one of those.” Shapiro also reckons, “one holy book says that even when a person is on his death-bed, Satan comes and tries to lure him into atheism and blasphemy. There is far greater knowledge of mankind in this statement than in all the ponderous volumes of all the Freudians, Jungians, Adlerians.” In the next chapter, he speaks of Sartre’s philosophy: “which no one understands since it is so vague and full of contradictions.” Shapiro returns to his earlier point later, saying, “when a man sleeps with a modern woman, he actually gets into bed with all her lovers. That’s why there are so many homosexuals today, because modern man is sleeping spiritually with countless men. He constantly wants to excel in sex because he knows that his partner is comparing him to the others. This is also the cause of impotence, from which many suffer.”
      Where to start with such claims? First of all, noting that Shapiro is not the narrator and that the book is a second-person account, even though the first person is evident almost all the way through. Second-person stories are rare: Jay McInernay’s Bright Lights, Big City, Ian Bank’s Complicity and Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, and it can be a good way of creating, as Banks’s title suggests, a complicit relationship between reader and writer. Yet The Penitent doesn’t quite feel like such a book, nor is it a homodiegetic account where the narrator isn’t the main character, as in The Great Gatsby and, to a less pronounced degree, Heart of Darkness. In both books, the narrator is vividly first-person, while the narrator in The Penitent is far more nebulous. Halfway through, at the end of the first day of this two-day account, Shapiro says, “Oh, it’s late! It’s time I went home. If you want to hear more of my story we can meet again tomorrow.” The narrator says, “Yes. I do. Let’s meet tomorrow.” When Gerard Genette differentiates between heterodiegetic, homodiegetic, and autodiegetic narration, he notes that the first offers a narrator who tells the story but who has no role within it, the homodiegetic narrator has a role but not the central one, and the autodiegetic narrator is the main figure in the story they tell. Sentimental Education is heterodiegetic, The Great Gatsby homodiegetic, and Catcher on the Rye, autodiegetic. If Shapiro were our narrator, we would be in an autodiegetic novel; if the barely present narrator had a greater role to play as they tell the story, the novel would be heterodiegetic. But so passive is the narrator that we know nothing about; we read the book almost as a simple first-person novel.
     In such a first-person account, we could insist the narrator isn’t someone we are supposed to take seriously, as we’re more inclined to regard highly Sartre and Freud’s thoughts over Shapiro’s. Shapiro offers an opinion but not much of a justification, and when the reader is put in a position between uninterrogated assumption and two of the 20th century’s most respected thinkers, why wouldn't we choose to view Shapiro as ignorant and keep our distance? In a first-person book, this would usually fall under unreliable narration, yet this is complicated by Shapiro telling the story to someone else, but whose perspective on this man we know nothing about.
     We will have more to say on Shapiro’s remarks, but for the moment, let us provide some narrative context. Joseph is a married man who takes up with a mistress and discovers he wants neither to remain with his wife nor continue the affair. He wishes to escape the decadent West and flies to Israel via Rome, wishing to become a religious man. We know he succeeds not because of anything the narrator says but through what Shapiro tells him and us. “Sometimes pious Jews with beards earlocks, and hats just like this I’m wearing now came to my office asking for donations of yeshivas.” However, as he tells his story, admits he had a sexual assignation on his way to Rome, was tempted again when he sees the woman in Jerusalem and isn’t shy in offering a prejudice throughout the two days he speaks, the bliss of faith is often absent. If Shapiro has become a man of God, the Lord is a judgmental one, with the book full of the sort of prejudices we have opened with.  
   Perhaps IB Singer’s novel wants to be a religious work yet paradoxically so: rather than doubting Joseph’s faith, we might doubt whether such a faith is worth having if it manifests itself in recrimination and self-recrimination — in Shapiro attacking those who live differently from how he does now, and how dismissive he is of his former life. When he speaks of women who sleep around and men who can’t find a decent woman to love and become homosexuals, this isn’t a live-and-let-live philosophy, but one insisting any other way of living beyond strict Orthodoxy is decadent and futile, purposeless and prurient. You can come away from the book assuming that, whatever belief Shapiro has in God, he has almost no faith in humans. Yet that isn’t quite true: he admires the woman who leads him to think of other women who drink like sailors and curse like streetwalkers. He is invited over to eat with the head of a yeshiva, the Jewish academy for Talmudic learning, and finds in her the traditional woman he felt no longer existed. “…This pious woman had long since accepted the onset of age as part of the honour of being a mother of grown children, a mother-in-law and a grandmother. Her eyes reflected the goodness of the true Jewish mother, not the mothers mocked in books and plays, and who American-Jewish writers and some psychoanalysts consider the source of their children’s nervous afflictions.” He also falls in love and marries a young widow, the older woman’s daughter: “She looked no more than eighteen, but I later learned she was twenty-four. One look sufficed to tell me a lot about her: first of all, that she was a rare beauty, not the kind fashioned in beauty parlours, but the beauty and charm that’s given by God.” She will become the mother of his children, giving her father the grandchildren he was worried he wouldn’t have, having lost one child to the 1948 war that established the Jewish state, and two that died young, leaving only this daughter, whose husband died six months after the wedding.
      There are then a few people Shapiro loves, but they are more products of God than they are of society, and the book is centrally about a man who rejects society and is determined to find faith. This, however, isn’t quite the same thing as saying this is Singer’s message. The writer claims, “when I write about a character I will say that he looked so and so and behaved so and so, but I won’t say he was a good man. Sometimes I read writers who say their characters are “noble” men. To me this is ridiculous. If the man was truly noble this should come across from what you tell about him. It’s up to the reader to judge.” (Commentary) Shapiro tells us what to think of people all the time: he describes his lover’s daughter as a “brute”, and “had the face of a murderer”, and calls people sitting in Israeli cafes “idlers”. Shapiro also has numerous opinions which take the form of the broadest generalisations. “Every new invention demands countless new victims. The automobile has already killed millions of people. The Airplane, too, is an angel of death.”  “When it comes to animals, every man is a Nazi” he says, as he discusses a person eating ham and eggs, later adding, “I ate meat, but a shudder ran through me each time I reminded myself how meat becomes meat.” He also admits that he bought his lover a fur coat, ‘with what rapture and enthusiasm she stroked the fur of those butchered animals. How she poured out praises for skins torn from the bodies of others!”  
         If we are supposed to distance ourselves from this narrator within the narration, what type of distance is required? Should we find him a pub bore lifted onto the page, a reactionary whom Singer ironically presents all the better to tell the reader that living in society, with its meat, its fur coats, its lovers, and its cars and aeroplanes, isn’t so bad? But many a reader who might not care for numerous Shapiro remarks will say they are vegetarian too, and admit there are too many cars on the road, planes in the sky and that wearing fur is disgusting. It isn’t so easy to mock a narrative figure who may share many of our beliefs. When Shapiro dismisses modern women, reckons Sartre makes no sense, and attacks recent technology, the reader might take him less seriously than when he speaks of murdered animals and the ability to become ever more decadent once we start to act badly: “I recalled what I learned as a boy: if you broke one of the Ten Commandments, you would break them all.” However, Singer would appear to seek neither complicity nor irony; instead insists the reader find in the work the ambivalence of their relationship with the world and with faith. It isn’t so much that the work wants us to believe in God and expect from us the moral rectitude that Shapiro tries to practise, but wishes for us to muse over the question in the first place.  
    Though it is commonly now assumed that if a writer has something to say, and has to add a few words in a forward or afterword, the book hasn’t quite managed to convey its intended meaning, we might wonder why so many 19th-century writers offered introductions, while many in the 20th century have made themselves available for interviews. Singer was often interviewed, and also, in The Penitent, provides an afterword in the form of an author’s note, written specifically for the English language edition. Here, he tells us that the novel was first published in The Jewish Daily Forward in 1973, a Jewish American newspaper with which Singer was closely associated. The Penitant was published in book form a year later, in Yiddish and then in English in 1983. In the afterword, Singer talks about giving an interview to the New York Times in 1979. Anybody who read the book and several years afterwards read the interview might well wonder if the words he offered in the novella were repudiated by the thoughts expressed when speaking about it, where Singer said that while he “believed in God and admired His divine wisdom, I could not see or glorify His mercy.” “My candid answer is that Joseph Shapiro may have done so, but I haven’t. I’m still as bewildered and shocked by the misery and brutality of life as I was as a sixteen-year-old child…To me, a belief in God and a protest against the laws of life are not contradictory.” He describes Shapiro as an angry man and an extremist.
       Singer’s note may be there to reassure the reader, but the gap between the narrator and Joseph is there formally within the text, however minimally. While many a book with a homodiegetic narrator will allow themselves to say a few words describing their life and experiences, the narrator in The Penitent is described only very elliptically by Joseph, when Shapiro says, for example, “I’m a few years younger than you.” If a reader were to infer who is Singer here (the unknown narrator or the very known Shapiro), it would be better to assume, were we to make such a claim at all, that the younger person referred to is Singer rather than Shapiro: that the unknown narrator is more inclined to be the author’s alter-ego. It makes sense to presume that if we know nothing about a narrator and a lot about the person telling a story to them within a text, then the former will resemble the writer, and the latter simply be a character inside the text. The narrator is, after all, the figure to whom the story is told and who has related it to us with minimum intrusion. A greater intervention would have made it more clearly homodiegetic, and the narrator’s absence altogether, autodiegetic. But part of the book’s interest lies in the gap, one that could easily be ignored but shouldn’t be underestimated.
       First-person books needn’t be taken as autobiographical even if they are autodiegetic. However, a book that announces the tiniest gap between the telling and our reading makes that fact unequivocal. Yet as Joseph Sherman says, no less a critic than Harold Bloom assumed that Singer is ‘’speaking to his readers directly through the mouth of Joseph Shapiro, and is advocating a strict return to religious Orthodoxy as a solution to the problems of modern Jewish identity and survival in an increasingly secularized and faithless world.’’ Sherman adds, ‘’In the light of Singer's often-repeated objections to twentieth-century worldliness, recorded in many interviews, this is an understandable assumption. It has been shared by many casual readers of the book, who are offended by Shapiro's unremitting hatred for the world and all its works…” (The Journal of Narrative Technique)
   One way of reading The Penitant is as an exploration of the alter ego as extremist, with the writer taking aspects of his predilections and preoccupations and exaggerating them in narrative form, all the better to understand positions he may potentially take. Were John Updike or even (the Jewish) Saul Bellow to write The Penitent, few would assume The Penitent to be either writer, just as if Singer were to write Couples or Herzog most critics wouldn’t draw comparisons. But Singer is very much a Jewish writer of faith, someone who says in interviews that “I always pray to God (and I do pray because I am in my way a religious man), don’t give me any power over any other human beings. I have always avoided this kind of power like the plague.” (Commentary) He also reckons, “from experience we know that it happens often in this world—I’m not speaking now of the next world—that evil is victorious. Wouldn’t you say that Hitler’s success was the triumph of evil? Certainly, he almost reached his goal. And those Germans who went along with him, in his evil ways, have not been punished.” These comments aren’t too far removed from Shapiro’s when he says: “that’s the nature of adultery — it demands boasting. Among men and women both. This is actually true of all crimes. Many criminals have been caught and sentenced because they boasted. The reason for this is that crime actually provides little pleasure, not even physical pleasure. You have to enhance this pleasure through boasting.”  
    But it isn’t that Shapiro sounds like Singer; more that Shapiro sounds like a Singer character, just as Herzog sounds like a Bellow one and Richard Maple in the short stories sounds like an Updike figure. A writer’s characters may resemble the writer, but much more often they will resemble one another, helping to create that particular universe we know as the writer’s world. If Zola’s characters resembled Camus’ and Flaubert’s Proust’s, their world would no longer be a world. They would collapse into each other, even if we might suppose that Bellow and Phillip Roth (as Jewish writers) might have more in common with each other than with Updike, while Updike might share a few similarities with Richard Yates and John Cheever. What matters isn’t that the writer writes about themselves but that they create selves which generate a world that distinguishes them from the worlds of others. When we propose that Singer’s statement isn’t too far removed from Shapiro’s, it rests on the degree to which he is a Singer character, more than he happens to be indistinguishable from the author.
  Yet no doubt in a writer’s work, some characters would seem more closely to resemble the writer than other figures in it. When Flaubert insisted he was Madame Bovary, it carries an anomalous provocation, while if Singer said he was Shapiro, Updike, Maple or Roth Zuckermann, it would seem more like a confession. However, this isn’t because the writer and character are one and the same, but the gap between them isn’t insurmountable. All it would take in Singer’s part is a hardening of opinion; in Flaubert, it would have required a sexual transition. However, Madame Bovary is as forcefully a Flaubert character as Shapiro is Singer’s — the issue is more one of the epicentral, perhaps a more useful word in this context than the autobiographic. Reading The Penitent, we can find many Singer preoccupations, and too, most especially, the moral meeting the spiritual, with Shapiro not just happy finding faith, but also condemning society, insisting on the two coming together. He wants to believe in God, certainly, but this could have been a tale about a man who finds faith without any need to comment on the social; just as someone could be disillusioned by people without needing to bring God into things.  
   Often, Singer does bring God into his other work through supernatural forces meeting moral irony, or through the complications of faith meeting no less great complications in life. In the story ‘Zeidlus the Pope’, the central character gives up his worldly goods and converts to Catholicism, all the while trying to become holier still, yet is seen to move further away from God as pride rather than lust or money proves to be his sin. In the novel, Enemies, A Love Story, the hero of the book believes his wife has died in the camps, and so he marries a woman he doesn’t love, moves to the States and takes a mistress, before realising his first wife is still alive. All the while, godly questions sit behind the book. But, usually, there is a stronger moral assertiveness than in most writers, whether Singer relies on the supernatural or not, whether the devil is so obviously manipulating things as in ‘Zeidlus the Pope’, or whether it is no more than a voice in the person’s head as we find in The Penitent. When Shapiro tells the narrator that “The Evil Spirit has been silenced, but I knew he would regain his tongue”, Shapiro may believe in the devil, but that doesn’t mean the reader has to, even in the context of the story. In ‘Zeidlus the Pope’, the tale hinges on the devil’s handiwork; in The Penitent it need be no more than a psychological conflict inside Shapiro’s head as he tries to be a good Jew. We see this when the Evil Spirit says, after Shapiro decides he will marry and devote himself to his new wife, “all this would be fine if you were a true believer, but actually you are nothing more than a heretic affected with nostalgia. You will soon turn back to your heretic ways, and what’s more, you’ll bring nothing but grief to a pious Jewish daughter”. This needn’t be any more than the doubts of someone trying to hold onto precarious faith. But the presence of this voice still functions much more strongly than we would expect in other post-war American writers focusing on characters going through self-doubt, whether it be in Bellow’s Herzog or in Roth’s The Dying Animal.
        This rests partly on many post-war Jewish writers accepting their cultural background but resisting the religiosity it might seem to entail. Though Bellow says he believes in God, he also insists, in the very paper Singer so often wrote for, that “my mother was extremely religious while my father avoided the subject. I’ve often wondered if in realitythis concealed an unresolved problem, and I’ll confess to you that I’ve never reached a definite conclusion.” (Forward) Roth reckoned, “I'm anti-religious. I find religious people hideous. I hate the religious lies. It's all a big lie.” (Guardian) Singer has always been unequivocally a believer, even if he has no interest in the fanatical. “I believe in God but not in man insofar as he claims God has revealed himself to him. If a man came to me and tells me he has been to the planet Mars, I would call him a liar, but I would not stop believing in the existence of the planet. I believe that the Higher Powers do not reveal themselves so easily; you have to search for them.” (Commentary) Yet his work is permeated by faith as no other Jewish writer of his time, and steeped in a tradition that most readers won’t know, but might sense: “I’ll tell you, I feel myself naturally a part of the Jewish tradition. Very strongly so!” Singer might add, “I wouldn’t say I feel myself a part of the Yiddish tradition. Somehow I always wanted to write in my own way, and I never felt that I was somebody’s disciple. For instance, Sholem Aleichem, who was a great writer, always used to say that he was a disciple of Mendele Mocher Seforim.” (Commentary) Nevertheless, reading his work, we are likely to see his interest in magic, superstition, the devil, and prophecy as reflective of a tradition. In the work of Bellow, Roth, Mailer, and even Bernard Malamud (probably closer to Singer in style and preoccupation than the others), we cannot. It is as if his belief in God is contained by a cultural faith that allows for neither the ambivalence of Bellow nor, of course, the atheism of Roth, but demands that Singer interrogate both God and society. He can believe in God and live in society, but that is a marrying of opposites Shapiro cannot quite tolerate. He must live initially to the full in society, and live no less fully his retreat from it into conservative Judaism. Shapiro moves from the life of an American bourgeois with a wife and a mistress, into a faith that condemns the decadence of his prior worldly existence.
      Since Singer has usually been better writing close to the further reaches of the spiritual over the material pleasures and benefits of America (Bellow has very much been the opposite), it would make sense that critics reading The Penitent would see Shapiro echoing Singer’s views over Singer using Shapiro to contextualise the complexity of his own. Bloom reckons, “the voice is indistinguishable from Singer’s…and there is no way to read this book except as Singer's tirade.” (New York Times) Bloom notes too that in The Penitent, Singer adopts a trope he commonly used: a fan comes to the well-known writer with a story he has to tell, and the difference in the novella is, for Bloom, that Shapiro has no story, only a jeremiad. Bloom isn’t entirely wrong, but he ignores the conceit and sees Singer taking straight what Bellow in his work would present satirically and often through a minor character. “Here is Singer/Shapiro in the kind of monologue that in Bellow would be deliberately satirical” (New York Times) as he quotes passages we have quoted above about a pure, decent woman providing far more gratification than all the refined whores in the world.
     Yet perhaps in this instance, Singer goes one further than Bellow, turning categorical satire into indeterminate irony, asking that we don’t take Shapiro seriously but that we oughtn’t to mock him either. To satirise a character is to mock not just the character but usually the underlying beliefs they possess, while indeterminate irony can allow for the undermining of character without dismissing the claims a character makes. Shapiro may be self-righteous, bigoted, self-absorbed and whinging, but he also captures within his hectoring despair a problem that many will agree with if not in quite the form he offers it. As Shapiro says, “thank God, I had lived long enough for the Jews to have found their own home…you saw with your own eyes what licentiousness led to: The KGB, The Gestapo. If you don’t want to be a Nazi, you must become the opposite,” and also reckons that “I am absolutely convinced that so long as people shed the blood of God’s creatures, there’ll be no peace on earth. It’s one step from spilling animal blood to spilling human blood.” These are Zionist and Vegetarian beliefs that many share, even if they might express them in less vociferous ways than Shapiro. Were someone to say it is important Jewish people have a land of their own after what happened in the camps, this needn’t mean that one believes licentious behaviour in Germany, Poland and Russia led to the creation of those camps. Equally, many are vegetarians without quite equating an animal’s loss of life with a human’s. Singer isn’t satirising Zionists and vegetarians, though he is asking us to distance ourselves from the character even if we might be sympathetic to some of Shapiro’s views. When we opened by wondering what to make of Shapiro’s remarks, we wished, first of all, to establish a technical relationship with them: to try and comprehend who the narrator happens to be and how relatively absent he is within the work. We know nothing about his private life and almost nothing about his own views except as an interjection. He interrupts Shapiro’s monologue early on to say that “…you must have faith that everything stated in the holy books was given to Moses on Mount Sinai. Unfortunately, I don’t have that faith.” Shapiro asks why he says “unfortunately” and the narrator replies: “Because I envy those that do.”
     This is an important distinction between the narrator and Shapiro. Shapiro is assertive; the narrator doubting, and had Singer offered satire over indeterminate irony, he would have placed us dispositionally in Shapiro’s place, no matter if we might have been taking an antithetical view on his position. The reader would be as certain as Shapiro, even as we mocked his beliefs. Better surely to be in a state of indeterminacy over those beliefs, partly because of the certitude in their expression, and extract from the book a place in between, one that leaves us in the sort of doubt the narrator alludes to rather than  a satirical counter-assertiveness that leaves us mocking Shapiro. Bloom knows exactly what to make of the book and rejects it as a failure because it didn’t present events satirically, regarding the only good passage, one where Shapiro is trying to have sex on the plane while flying from New York to Rome. It is a funny account, but extended to the length of a novella, it would have been tiresome, while Shapiro’s monologue is tiring. But at least the latter allows us into the head of a man we should take seriously, rather than in the mind of one who is no more than the butt of an author’s ridicule. The Penitent becomes a perplexing work, and this may be why Singer felt the need for the afterword: to say that he can take a character seriously without sharing his disposition, and finding in the man’s assertions the indeterminacy of his own beliefs. As Singer says, “the agonies and the disenchantments of Joseph Shapiro may to a degree stir a self-evaluation in both believers and sceptics. The remedies that he recommends may not heal everybody’s wounds, but the nature of the sickness will, I hope, be recognised.” (The Penitent) Clearly, it wasn’t.

© Tony McKibbin