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27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Clearly not for everyone, April 30, 2004
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.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Surreal and Picaresque, November 29, 2000
By A Customer
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.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Utility or Futility? The Tale of a Bitter--Butter--Knife, September 23, 1997
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
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