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Overview
Puttermesser yearns for a daughter and promptly creates one, unassisted, in the form of the first recorded female golem. Laboring in the dusty crevices of the civil service, she dreams of reforming the city - and manages to get herself elected mayor. Puttermesser contemplates the afterlife and is hurtled into it headlong, only to discover that a paradise found is also paradise lost. Overflowing with ideas, lambent with wit, The Puttermesser Papers is a tour de force by one of our most visionary novelists.
"The finest achievement of Ozick's career... It has all the buoyant integrity of a Chagall painting." -San Francisco Chronicle
"Fanciful, poignant... so intelligent, so finely expressed that, like its main character, it remains endearing, edifying, a spark of light in the gloom." -The New York Times
"A crazy delight." -The New York Time Book Review
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780679777397 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 06/30/1998 |
| Series: | Vintage International |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 1,122,127 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Interviews
On Sunday, September 7th, barnesandnoble.com welcomed Cynthia Ozick to discuss THE PUTTERMESSER PAPERS.
Moderator: Welcome to the barnesandnoble.com Live Events Auditorium. Tonight Cynthia Ozick is joining us by phone to respond to questions about her latest novel, THE PUTTERMESSER PAPERS. Welcome, Ms. Ozick! Thanks for joining us tonight. Is this your first online interview?
Cynthia Ozick: Thank you. No, actually, it is not. I've done one with The Atlantic Monthly in the same, rather inconvenient manner, since though I do own a modem, it is under the dresser.
Anna Collins from Larchmont, NY: How is writing essays different from writing fiction? Do you have a more specific audience in mind when you are writing essays?
Cynthia Ozick: Very important question. The difference is profound. I have no specific audience in mind when writing either. The difference, however, is that with an essay, you know at least what you're writing about. You may not know precisely what you may think, or what conclusion you will come to in the end, but you surely do know what the subject is. With fiction you face a vast unknown, you hear at first mysterious voices, but they are whispered behind a veil.
Jerard from United Kingdom: I've read some of your work with great interest, but it is hard to find in the UK. Will more of it be published over here soon, including your new book?
Cynthia Ozick: I hugely hope so! There are two collections of essays in Britain. One is called WHAT HENRY JAMES KNEW, and the other is PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A BAD CHARACTER. Jonathan Cape has published THE SHAWL.
Cheryl Singer from Jewish Communication Network, NY: Why did the golemette come and go so quickly in the book? My favorite. Keep her around longer in your next book, please.
Cynthia Ozick: The female golem, like all members of her species, is fashioned only to be undone; that, alas, is the nature of her species: dust unto dust. However, Cheryl, you can easily whip up your own golem if you can discover the necessary incantation.
Rory from Florida: Hey, Cynthia. I have one question and one statement for you:
1) I am planning to write a book of commentaries very soon (I am already in the eighth grade and figured that December would be the perfect time to start). When I start writing this book, should I think of what commentaries I want to write? Do some research? What should I do?
2) Also, my Mom, Faith (Fuhrman) Aronsky went to school from sixth to eighth grade with your nephew Daniel at West Chester Day School in Mamaroneck, New York, and was wondering how he is doing. Thanks a bunch!
Cynthia Ozick: To respond to the second part first: Daniel Ozick is a computer engineer in the superwhiz category. Please allow me to be his surrogate in sending your mom best regards! As for commentaries, I hope you won't think this reply condescending, it is not meant to be, but I think it is first necessary to study at least five more years. Commentaries are, even for the prodigious, the work of ripeness. Good luck!
Philip from Brooklyn: What is it about George Eliot that is so attractive to Ruth?
Cynthia Ozick: The story of George Eliot's life is an intellectual Cinderella tale, a mind brought to exuberant flower through love of another mind. Ruth is in love with the metaphysical and cognitive forces of the human race as well as the moral and the psychological, and so is George Eliot.
Sara K. from Washington, D.C.: It's interesting that Ruth doesn't reproduce the way most women do, by getting pregnant, but instead creates a golem. What is behind this idea?
Cynthia Ozick: I think the difference is significant. It relates to the old saying that any cat can have kittens. The human intellect creates eggs and fertility without ovaries.
Robert Markham from Hartford: Do you have any quirky writing habits? Do you listen to music, write in the nude? I think your piece in The New Yorker Love edition was fantastic! All my best to you!
Cynthia Ozick: Thank you immensely. I write in loose clothing but definitely clothed. I write mainly at night, and though I used to be an afficionado of the fountain pen, I am now acutely attached to the dollar and a half espresso, which flows from the fingers ecstatic. Which is not to say writing isn't the hardest work I know.
Derek from Grosse Point: I am just getting through PUTTERMESSER, I think it is wonderful, but I am dying to know: Why the Department of Receipts and Disbursements? Did you have a particular experience with this department that inspired their role in the book?
Cynthia Ozick: I personally didn't, but I am close to someone who witnessed the bureaucratic worms.
Darla from Hinsdale, IL: What's your most oft-repeated advice to fiction-writing students?
Cynthia Ozick: Pay no attention to writing seminars when you are told, "Write what you know." If you are a woman, pay no attention to the shoddy notion that you must have a female role model. In other words, seek out what you don't know and refuse being circumscribed by the limitations of your own experience and your own body. Venture into invention.
Donna Fischer from Westchester: What do you say to those who say Ruth Puttermesser is your own alter ego? True or false or not that simple?
Cynthia Ozick: Both utterly false and not that simple. Autobiographically speaking, I have nothing in common with her. Yet there are a few traits we are both heir to: bookishness, brooding, self-doubt, inferiority, lack of self-confidence. However, one reviewer attributed Ruth's periodontal disease to me, and that, I confess, angered me. My gums happen to be in excellent condition.
Thom Frick from Columbus, OH: Did your vision of THE PUTTERMESSER PAPERS change at all over the 30 years it took to complete? Were you surprised at all by the way it turned out?
Cynthia Ozick: I was often enormously surprised along the way, but I was not in the least surprised by the way poor Puttermesser's life ended. This was foreshadowed in the very first chapter in her fears of street muggers. What I didn't foresee was that she would be murdered and raped in her own home. This amazed and shocked me.
Molly from South Bend, IN: What is the building pictured on the cover of THE PUTTERMESSER PAPERS? Did you design the jacket?
Cynthia Ozick: A designer at Knopf is responsible for the jacket. The building is New York City's city hall at night. It does somehow suggest Sherlock Holmes's spooky London. Do you like it?
Rebecca Harper from Portland: What was the first piece that you wrote that was published? You are a great voice in literature and criticism!
Cynthia Ozick: Many thanks. As I recall, my first published fiction appeared in Prarie Schooner, a publication at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. I was then already quite old -- 28 -- for a first publication, and I went to the zoo that day to celebrate.
Rick Forest from Wilmington: Do you have a favorite writer?
Cynthia Ozick: Not one, not several, but many. Most are the traditional 19th-century masters, among them the Russians, Henry James, Conrad; Forster was a strong early influence. Among contemporaries, I hugely admire Alice Munro, our Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike, American masters all. I also believe that the voice of Gordon Lish is astoundingly original and sorrowful.
Carson from Baltimore: Thanks for taking my question here tonight, Ms. Ozick. Your writing has always seemed to me to have a touch of magical realism in it. Has this been an intentional effect, or are you a reader of magical realism?
Cynthia Ozick: I think writers really don't know who and what they are, and surely not what they do and how they do it. Earlier in my life, I was certainly profoundly influenced by reading, but by now I seem to float in my own hermetically sealed, aging amniotic fluid.
Carey Barden from Manhasset, NY: As a reader of classic literature, do you agree with claims that contemporary writing is going downhill? How do you think today's literature compares with the classics? Do you think the change has anything to do with the proliferation of superstores?
Cynthia Ozick: No. Superstores carry books, this makes them valuable. The change in the literary atmosphere, I fear, is not in any diminishment of the quality of writers and writing, but rather in the quality of readers and reading. I believe that literature -- the real thing -- is becoming more and more the province of a select few, and that the habit of reading is being displaced and replaced by the habit of these appliances that take all our attention, such as film and TV. This very medium that you and I are communicating through, by contrast, appears to be reviving an epistolary culture, and may, after all, contribute to a rise in high literacy.
Mira from Long Beach: I was really impressed by THE PUTTERMESSER PAPERS; it is truly a fantastic story. But why on earth did you have to kill her off in the end? Why such a violent death?
Cynthia Ozick: To my astonishment, a number of readers have asked this and appear to be offended by the violence. How can this be, given the violence all around us and in film and on TV? Puttermesser has crashed into reality.
Pat from California: With which of your stories do you laugh the most?
Cynthia Ozick: Such an interesting question. I'm afraid that the act of writing is so scary and anxiety-filled that I never laugh at all. In fact, when people tell me that such and such a scene or story is comical, I tend to gape. I did not intend comedy -- ever, as far as I know. It's probably all a mistake. I am essentially a lugubrious writer. Ha ha!
Flo from Washington, D.C.: What do you feel is the best way to become a good writer, by reading good works, taking classes, or simply writing? How did you perfect it?
Cynthia Ozick: Whatever else you do, read, read, read. No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, don't confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.
David Schneider from Marymount: What are you working on now? Fiction or more essays? When will it be out? Also, who, if anyone, do you consider a strong Jewish voice in fiction?
Cynthia Ozick: The answer to the second question is Philip Roth, among American writers. In Israel there is preeminently Aharon Appelfeld. To the first question: a long essay and a short story.
Craig from Ottawa, IL: I enjoy good writing and envy those with the skill. Your sentences snuggle together so nicely, encouraging me forward, and at times, I can lose myself in their flow. I have long wished to write with enjoyment. Any suggestions for a middle-aged man who is usually all thumbs with the pen?
Cynthia Ozick: I don't know any writer who can be said to write with enjoyment. It seems to me that every sentence begins with, as you put it, the thumbs, but scratch away long enough at a sentence and the thumbs can turn into swans. In this connection, Philip Roth in THE GHOSTWRITER expresses it best: "A writer turns and turns a sentence and then turns and turns it again." The age of the writer, by he way, is irrelevant to the work. Charge ahead!
Rory from Florida: Cynthia, three more questions:
1) How do you overcome writer's block?
2) How much time do you spend writing?
3) How do you put life into your characters? Do you use character sheets? Do you watch people's personalities and write them down? How do you do it?
Cynthia Ozick: Dear Rory, I write all the time except when I am interrupted by having to live. I certainly use no mechanical techniques like character sheets. I read, I think, I write. I've more or less given up living in the sense of social life, but you, as an eighth grader, should not contemplate this. What kind of name is Rory for a yeshiva boy?
Sara Barker from Manhattan: I read in your bio that you are a James reader. Do you think he is still relevant in today's society?
Cynthia Ozick: Good God, yes!
Paul from New Jersey: Do you think that Ruth grew along with you over the years? Could you mark her development in sync with your own?
Cynthia Ozick: Not truly. I think a fictional invention grows according to its own development, not the author's. Characters in fiction are not simply as alive as you and me, they are more alive. Becky Sharp, Elizabeth Bennett, and Don Quixote may not outlive the burning out of the sun, but they will certainly outlive the brief candle of our lives.
Moderator: Thanks so much for satisfying our curiosities here tonight! We hope you'll be back to discuss your future projects in the barnesandnoble.com Auditorium. Goodnight!
Cynthia Ozick: Well, thank you
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