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The Puttermesser Papers

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As others have already pointed out, to call this a novel is misleading. While it can be read as a novel (as I did and you should), "The Puttemesser Papers" is actually a compilation of independent short stories revolving around a dominant character: Ruth Puttermesser. The different sections could be read in any order and you could love it (or hate it, I suppose) just as much.

Having never read anything of Cynthia Ozick's, I was anxious to find out whether she measured up to the National Book Award Finalist sticker on the cover or whether she would be just another pretentious modern voice full of intellect but ultimately lacking in storytelling ability, like say Jonathan Franzen in "The Corrections."

Well, fear not, Ozick is a superb storyteller and a prose stylist. She not only commands the English language as well as anyone, but she does so while combining vivid characters, intelligent insights into modern life, great observational detail, and interesting trivia. And she manages to do it in service to subtle plots that have a great deal to say about life, love, happiness, the illusiveness of satisfation and our stubborn resistance to learning.

I don't want to discuss the storylines, I leave that to other reviewers. Ultimately, I think any plot summaries are a disservice in this case, as the plots are somehow almost secondary to everything else going on in the stories, mainly Puttermesser's rich interior life.

Now some criticism: this book has the potential to enrage a few readers with its frequent allusions to literary, philosophical, political, musical and historical esoterica and its sprinkling of foreign phrases. I don't see a lot of younger people appreciating it; but it's not just age that might impede enjoyment, you need to be somewhat well rounded. The more cultured and well read you are, the more you will enjoy it. That's not to pat myself on the back, and I'm certainly not trying to put anyone off, it's just truthful. This isn't Stephen King or Michael Crichton. There aren't any cliffhangers here, no mystery or suspense, no real shock value. Yes, there are some surreal fantasy elements early on in the Xanthippe section (which is something of an updating of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein), but these are mostly subtle, character-driven stories.

While I consider this to be great fiction, I don't expect "The Puttemesser Papers" to be described as a classic 100 years from now because its appeal is too limited, and it's not really a novel. This is a shame, really, because Ruth Puttermesser is a great character and these are truly great stories with a lot to say. And Ozick says it efficiently and entertainingly.

By combining a good eye, sharp wit, and lighthearted cynicism, the award-winning author Cynthia Ozick writes the ultimate parable about the fatalistic idealism that disheartens every true rationalist in her compilation, "Puttermesser Papers". Ruth Puttermesser is a cerebral, yet philosophical Jewish Manhattanite. As we journey through different episodes in her life, Puttermesser searches for identity, experiments occassionally in love, and struggles to realize her ideals. Ozick's main purpose eventually shows itself to be the exploration of the ghastly possibility that failures in life sometimes occur not necessarily because we dont have the drive to fulfill our ideals, but that ideals are simply ideals and can never be realized in a world like ours.

Puttermesser demonstrates this (yet never seems to see it until the end; after all she IS a rationalist) through failed love affairs, the destruction of her brilliant law career by an unqualified colleague, an initially successful but ultimately disasterous and futile tenure as the esteemed mayor of New York City, her attempts to use her legal skills to acquire citizenship for her Muscovite cousin (who in actuality only came to America to earn money), her murder and rape (in that order), and finally Ozick's final discourse, on Puttermesser and the meaning of Paradise. The same point is demonstrated as Puttermesser, a person whose thoughts are seldom erratic, besides her occasional fits of self-delusion (I remind you AGAIN, she IS a rationalist) fails yet time and time again in her very logical and carefully calculated efforts to do what every scientist and rationalist has always tried to do; to attempt to better their lives by analyzing a problem, and trying to solve it. Her motives seem attainable, well-planned, and surprisingly logical; yet she is strangely baffled, however, as reality falls short of her ideals every time.

The final passages of the book explain Puttermesser's realization (after death) that Paradise, the word she gives to the

Although The Puttermesser Papers is billed as a novel, it is not a novel in the traditional sense but rather five short works of fiction, each of which could stand alone. Each "story" gives us insight into the life of Ruth Puttermesser, student, idealist and lover of the law. These fictions illuminates various stages of Puttermesser's life, about a decade apart, and beginning when Puttermesser is thirty-four.

Although we come to realize in the first story that this will constitute a biography of sorts, it is a very different biography in that the facts seem, more often than not, to contradict themselves. Identity, in Puttermesser's world, is something very elusive and suspect. For example, we witness a conversation between Puttermesser and her Uncle Zindel only to later learn that the conversation really did not occur.

This is a surrealistic book and we learn to accommodate its contradictions. In fact, after a time, they even become rather comforting rather than disorienting. Life, after all, is full of contradictions and Ozick wisely challenges the very idea that one's life story can be set in stone and fully told. What is consciousness and what is below the surface, she seems to be asking. Is life more accurately represented by external or internal experience? Ozick shows us Ruth Puttermesser's life from both the external and the internal viewpoint and she also leaves a good many gaps in between. One thing, though, is abundantly clear: Puttermesser's life as a lawyer in the New York City Department of Receipts and Disbursements is, internally, far richer than it is externally.

We first encounter the eternally unattractive Ruth Puttermesser in bed, engaged in the study of the Hebrew grammar she loves so much and eating the fudgy sweets to which she seems addicted. In fact, the only thing more enticing for Puttermesser than a night of Hebrew grammar and fudge seems to be the idea of paradise, a paradise in which she envisions herself voraciously reading anything and everything she somehow managed to miss while on earth.

While waiting on paradise, however, Puttermesser must endure the day-to-day bureaucracy of city government. This is a bleak existence, but one in which Puttermesser dreams of ideals like merit and justice for all. As an independent candidate from the Independents for Socratic and Prophetic Justice party, Puttermesser dreams of running for mayor and transforming New York into a place where youth gangs wash cars for fun, where slum dwellers suddenly transform their own dwellings out of a sense of pride and nothing else and pimps decide it's high time they learn some computer skills. In short, Puttermesser dreams of transforming New York into a place that is simply not New York.

In a section entitled Puttermesser Paired, the heroine develops and idealized friendship with a younger man in which she confirms her belief that the brain is the seat of the emotions. The man, a reproduction painter, does little more than read with Puttermesser, something that fascinates them both, and their relationship is the very embodiment of George Eliot's romantic life.

The final section, Puttermesser in Paradise, is a Mobius strip and suggests that the written word is tantamount to life, itself. This is a picaresque and surreal book and one that is highly entertaining if not completely fulfilling. Sadly, I think it will appeal to only a very limited audience.

No, this book is not for everyone--it is for those people who love books so much they cannot imagine how anyone could not. Puttermesser, as a character, is a variation on the ideal reader: she wants the world to match the perfection of the written word. Ozick is erudite, but why is this a failing? In some of her previous work she lets the erudition overcome the story and characters, but I think she succeeded in balancing the two poles of her storytelling with her creation of Puttermesser. This is beautiful book, if only for the final chapter, which among other things, confronts the central difficulties of existence in a provocative and harrowing manner.

This is a book about Justice, Love and Reading. Highly recommended.

Is life really this frustrating for intelligent Jewish females in New York city? This novel (as is clearly enough noted in these reviews, really a collection of stories / novellas) describes various stages in the life and death of Ruth Puttermesser, who was brilliant in law school, but somehow never managed to turn that into a successful career, let alone a satisfying relationship. Meanwhile, the reader can sit back and watch as she briefly becomes mayor -- her downfall is as fast as her rise -- or gets married to a younger man whose whole purpose in doing so was to leave her.

For reading this book, it's good if you have a broad education, otherwise certain -- sometimes essential -- point might escape you. Still, Ozick's erudition is sometimes a bit much: as if she had swallowed an encyclopaedia. Also, her writing style relies a bit much on a particular trick: paragraphs start out with narratively relevant material, but then peter out in (oh so) witty observation. "Puttermesser had a younger sister who was also highly motivated, but she had married an Indian, a Parsee chemist, and gone to live in Calcutta. Already the sister had four children and seven saris of various fabrics." Cute, but after a couple of times it becomes a trick.

I don't want to get into a full review; the Papers are deep and rich, and I myself am an overladen government bureaucrat, sneaking a few minutes at Amazon. But the last review struck me, for the quality of its misapprehension. Ruth Puttermesser may be many things, but I don't think that we're told by Ozick that one of those things is sad. Her life is confined; small (few acquaintances); frequently trammeled by misfortune; but it's so focussed and beautifully realized and imagined that I think to say that it's sad is way off the mark. To have the imagination and the passionate rationality to shape a golem, to love a copyist, to offer a counterpoise to the ardent Russian cousin...I think Ozick has described a character that describes something wonderful in many people I know.

Cynthia Ozick has written a brilliant book about the construction, collapse, and trepidation accompanying the laying of the foundations, of castles in the air. In each chapter, Ruth Puttermesser, a lonely woman with an internal life so rich that her external one seems to exist only to provide grist for its mill, becomes the prisoner of her own imagination. Not a new technique--Puttermesser is only one link of a chain punctuated by such luminaries of the internal life as Baron Munchausen and Walter Mitty. What gives Puttermesser her pathos, Ozick her brilliance and the book itself its almost biblical cadence is the way each Puttermesserian adventure begins marked by the heroine's own reluctance, crescendoes like a runaway locomotive, and ends not with a bang but a whimper. We watch each castle in the air demolished brick by brick. Puttermesser's disappointment at each misadventure, real, imagined or somewhere in between, is savvy but genuinely hurt--as though one part of her knew, snarkily, that she would fail all along, and the other part, stunned and wounded, actually feels the pain of the failure. In addition to her unmatched powers as dream mason, Ozick is a fount of arcane knowledge (from Kaballah to George Eliot's sex life), a sharp social observer (the chapter wherein she skewers what Lucy Dawidowicz called "soft-minded liberalism" is a joy to read) and a flawless stylist, whose every paragraph reflects the ethos of Puttermesser herself--spare, sparse, uncompromisingly tough-minded, yet cognizant of, and awed by, beauty. To read The Puttermesser Papers is to be swept away by a rich and ultimately realistic fantasy life and to be haunted, a long time hence, by the beauty of Ozick's prose, the questions with which Puttermesser wrestles, and Puttermesser herself, as winning a heroine, in her own way, as any in 20th-century literature.

Reading this work is like being hit by a bolt of lightning. You aren't really sure WHAT has happened to you, but you know it was something extremely powerful...and you stand in awe of its creator. I want to re-read the PAPERS someday and marvel once again at Ozick's imagination and skill.

The Puttermesser Papers

I have heard about,read about,and read several of her articles and reviews in Commentary and N Y Review of Books.So finally reading one of Cynthia Ozick's novels,or is it a collection of novellas is familiar,but new. Oh yes though her fictionalized characters are stereotyped and surreal, there is now parody,satire,stilletto words that mirror a neo-con perspective that hurts.Now her fiction entertains,bewilders all from a new kind of Swiftian universe.and Charles Lamb "roast pig" solution

Ms Puttermesser is a polymath filled with Greek philosophers,ancient talmudic rabbis with arcane magic that enables her to resurrect the golem from Bronx grand concourse dirt. Only this time she is named after Socrate's wife who aids and abets Puttermesser ascent from the bowels of NY city bureaucracy to mayor of NY. This is after a stint in the backroom of a Wasp law firm doing the backroom "Jewish" legal research. Her adventures with her golem cover the universe of science and parodies of NY life. Puttermeister has to put her to death,embarking then on lust and love in Manhattan where she ultimately conquers and loses. Finally with her Russian cousin as her cynical counterpart she takes after the upper west side liberalism with a slashing attack on the Tikkun crowd and Michael Lerner. Ruth ends up in paradise with the Plato entourage and Henry James. Within the earthbound story is the reenactment of the Lewes- George Eliot romance in a beady repetition of romance and death in Venice a la many stories and movies on the Grand Canal. So what! Well it entertains,but there is a real unsettling darkness here also that pains and depresses one to the marrow. Even a Freudian interpretation,so now out of fashion,does not hit the dreads Ozick portrays in the murky sub texts of her contrarian embedded prose.The word picaresque could be applied here as a canonical theme of this book,but it would be too easy an application. Ozick has other motives in mind.Her characters exhibit fatuous ideological posturing defending and attacking cultural continuity.

The Putermesser Papers. A Novel by Cynthia Ozick.New York,Vintage International,1998.

-- Harold J.Fine

In Ozick's book, "The Puttermesser Papers" the reader encounters brilliance, insight and literary wisdom which is perhaps unsurpassed. The book presents the dilemma of a highly trained and highly intelligent and highly well read protagonist, who observes her life and presents her life philosophy, as it tangentially touches the rest of the world. Despite this life of mostly solitude and unhappiness there is the incisive uncovering of a universality of man/woman.

The book discusses the cycles of life, and afterlife, through the eyes of the protagonist, Puttermesser. Her life starts on a good footing; she makes certain decisions that are done mostly for ethical and aesthetic reasons. The changes make her happier, sometimes, and unhappy most of the time. Nonetheless, she perseveres. She stumbles through life's pitfalls and works them through, both professionally and personally. In fact, with a little help from some spiritual friends, she rises to exalted levels of power.

But, then the cycle changes. Those same friends that got her to high places, conspire to ruin this achievement, and in fact are successful at destroying it. She becomes a pariah in her own town, in her own neighborhood. And she sadly watches as all she has accomplished comes undone.

At the nadir of her life, she dies. And she does not just die, she is murdered. But that is not where the story ends. The story continues into Paradise, the Garden of Eden, Heaven, where she finds what she did not really expect. In Paradise, she finds that it is only necessary for one to 'think it so,' and it is so, in Paradise. But similarly to real life, all things must pass, and thus whatever one thinks into existence in Paradise, is also destined to disappear. And thus, Ozick reveals, that Paradise is not only Heaven, but also Hell simultaneously: A simulacrum of life.

And thus, Ozick leaves us with the age old question: Is it better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all? Or, as Ozick put it "Better never to have loved than loved at all. Better never to have risen than had a fall."

The book is recommended for all highly read people as the literary references are many. And the uses of them are brilliant. In addition, the book is recommended to anyone who is trying to answer the question of love, in terms of whether it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. The book provides spiritual, mundane and metaphysical thoughts on the cycle of life and afterlife, that provide highly provocative concepts to consider with regard to that question.