Books: Brothers and Masters

THE PENITENT

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 170 pages;

$13.95

THE BROTHERS SINGER by Clive Sinclair

Allison & Busby; 176 pages; $14.95

For most of this century, Isaac Bashevis Singer has spoken for a great and ancient minority: demons. In his fiction, they install themselves in mirrors to afflict women with vanity, render bridegrooms impotent on wedding nights, knock over Sabbath candles, spill poor men's dinners. "The demons," he says, "represent to me, in a sense, the ways of the world. Instead of saying this is the way things happen, I will say this is the way demons behave."

Evidently the imps are powerful enough to influence even a Nobel laureate. Hence the strange ambivalence of The Penitent. This "new" novel was first published in 1973. It exhibits Singer's narrative mastery, but none of his compassion; it offers only one character, Joseph Shapiro, and he is so acrimonious that in an afterword, Singer disavows his own creation: "While I was brought up among extremists who thought and felt like that angry man... I cannot agree with him."

Few can. Shapiro is afflicted with a temperament suited less to a religious zealot than to a retrograde cab driver. In Jerusalem, the bitter, aging monologuist recalls his days in America. There, "as in Sodom, the perpetrator went free and the witness rotted in jail. And all this was done in the name of liberalism." Argues Shapiro: "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."

Shapiro's screed is occasionally diverted by memories of adulteries past ("Sin, too, requires time"), but his principal obsessions are the idols of contemporary society: novels, psychiatry, sociology, pornography, politics, and worldliness in general. In his view, humanity's chance for redemption lies in unquestioning faith. That alone can reconcile the hopes of humanity and the violence of history. Shapiro takes a circuitous route to arrive at Dante's dictum: "In his will is our peace."

As in the past, Singer fuses two styles: the fabulist confined to his shtetl and the modernist who regards the universe as a stark and enigmatic combat zone. If Joseph Shapiro is disagreeable, he is never less than credible; once again the author displays a talent for mimicry that has previously allowed him to imitate Satan, fools, saints and, on one occasion, a rooster. True, his gift has been squandered on a man with no redeeming features, but for once Singer is not out to charm his readers. He and his penitent seem content to prove the old Yiddish proverb "Going backward is still a form of travel."