San Francisco Chronicle
The finest achievement of Ozick's career. . . It has all the buoyant integrity of a Chagall painting.
Joan Smith
The Indian guru
Krishnamurti taught that bliss is the
suspension of thought, and most religious
mystics believe that thought -- the naming and
analysis of experience -- is (alas) the enemy of
both experience and true joy. We are
compelled to organize our ideas about a
moment, and thus lose the moment itself. This
is the old cautionary fable of the poet, the
philosopher, the crusader so enamored of
abstraction -- world peace, justice, universal
love -- he is oblivious to people, and to the
embodiment of those ideals in his immediate
vicinity.
To anyone who loves ideas and words, this is
a painful wisdom, and a doubtful one. If we
were not meant to cogitate our way through
life, why were we blessed with the gift of
thinking so elaborately and with such
pleasure? Yet it is clearly true that mental
virtuosity, however desirable a talent, is no
guarantee of emotional satisfaction.
In her new high comic novel, The
Puttermesser Papers, Cynthia Ozick, one of
our most gifted interpreters of the idea,
delineates this dilemma in the person of Ruth
Puttermesser -- brilliant, Jewish, bookish,
pedantic, lonely, funny, endearing and so
enamored of her ideals she invents life to
fulfill them, featuring a job as a lawyer in
Manhattan's civil service, a system she
idealizes as the perfect meritocracy, the
embodiment of democratic dreams, until she
is summarily dismissed by a new
commissioner who wants to appoint an old
friend to replace her. A golem named
Xanthippe (for the shrewish wife of Socrates)
turns Ruth into the mayor of New York and
helps her turn the city into a crime-free
cultural and intellectual utopia. She wins a
lover who seems the fulfillment of her fantasy
of an intellectual soul mate, a dream modeled
on 19th century novelist George Eliot's love
affair with George Lewes. Lastly, she finds an
afterlife in which old rejections and
humiliations and failures are redeemed:
Indifferent lovers turn ardent, audiences
respond with respect to work they once
disdained.
But each fulfillment of a desire, whether on
earth or in Paradise, seems in the end to bring
new pain. Golems and soul mates betray our
Puttermesser. Edenic love fades away. For if
meaning is an elusive pleasure and the
intellectual life seems lonely and fraught with
idiosyncratic cravings, pure experience --
Puttermesser in Paradise has a baby and
marries her first unrequited love -- is equally
unsatisfactory when it is invoked to fulfill old
desires.
A Buddhist might say that desire itself is the
problem, but Ozick's Puttermesser is so funny
and lovely in her cravings. "In Eden (she
writes) all satiabilities are nourished. I will
learn about the linkages of genes, about
quarks, about primate sign language, theories
of the origin of the races, religions of ancient
civilizations, what Stonehenge meant. I will
study Roman law, the more arcane varieties
of higher mathematics, the nuclear
composition of the stars, what happened to
the Monophysites, Chinese history, Russian
and Icelandic."
Puttermesser is all of us who read and yearn,
and if her world is illusory, her life often
lonely and painful, Ozick has, with her acute
sympathy and her own verbal virtuosity,
rendered her unforgettable -- master of a sad,
funny illusion that is nonetheless thrilling and
worth having, however a mystic, or
Puttermesser herself, might judge it in the
end. -- Salon
Kirkus Reviews
From the author of The Messiah of Stockholm (1987), and other highly praised novels, a gathering of previously published stories and their newer counterparts, comprising a fictional biography of the remarkable character whom it's tempting to proclaim Ozick's alter ego.
Ruth Puttermesser, who first appeared in 1981's Levitation: Five Fictions, is a formidably learned polymath deeply rooted in the world of literary culture (she idolizes George Eliot, and has read the entire 'Faerie Queene') and that encompassing her more mundane duties as attorney for New York City's Department of Receipts and Disbursements ("Her heart beat for law, even for tax law"). Puttermesser rises to the post of First Bursary Officer but is abruptly demoted, then terminated, by an upstart colleague. When her frustrated love life and yearnings for motherhood overstimulate her imagination, Puttermesser unintentionally wills into being a golem (named Xanthippe, after Socrates's shrewish wife), a creature that serves her impeccably, even orchestrating her initially successful tenure as New York's Mayor—until the golem, like her human creator, succumbs to the madness of love and must be destroyed. This literally surreal sequence is followed by Puttermesser's star-crossed liaison with a younger man (who, she fantasizes, will play the twentysomething J.W. Cross to her aging George Eliot), then by a rather muted account of her sponsorship of her Russian cousin Lidia ("a perfected Soviet avatar"). Finally, Ozick portrays "Puttermesser in Paradise," where, after being murdered and raped (in that order), she experiences the fulfillment denied her in life: marriage to the older lover who had long ago abandoned her, and the birth of her child.
Despite its slapdash structure and inevitable narrative lacunae, this is one of Ozick's most appealing books: a witty, precisely written, enjoyably sympathetic depiction of a worldly woman who's also a hopeful romantic—a thinker who learns that "it was possible for brains to break the heart" and that it's also possible to muddle through, and maybe even endure.
