The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick
Jeanne Claire van Ryzin

Cynthia Ozick. The Puttermesser Papers. Knopf, 1997. 236 pp. $23.00.

The Puttermesser Papers is Cynthia Ozick’s elegant, searing, and darkly humorous tale of the impossibilities and paradoxes of paradise found and paradise lost. The novel presents a picaresque story of Ruth Puttermesser, a dowdy overeducated and idealistic middle-aged lawyer. Demoted from her bureaucratic job in New York City’s Kafkaesque Department of Disbursements and Receipts, Puttermesser accidentally creates a golem, Xanthippe (after Socrates’ wife), whose superpowers manage to get Puttermesser elected as mayor of New York. The city quickly becomes a vision of urban utopia only to be destroyed in vengeance by Xanthippe, as all golems do.
A decade later Puttermesser embarks on her next adventure when she falls in love with the younger Rupert Rabeeno, a painter who makes exact replicas of masterpieces and sells them as postcards identified as “Re-enactments.” In her final escapade Puttermesser rescues a distant Soviet cousin who emigrates to the U.S. as a refugee only to turn out to be hardly the oppressed victim Puttermesser had imagined. Indeed, Puttermesser is finally too idealistic and quixotic for the dark and immoral forces at work in the final decades of the millennium as her violent and random death suggests.
The novel shifts between Jewish magical-realist tale, a bitingly satirical tale of contemporary New York life, and a realistic story of modern life. Indeed, if anything, the novel’s only minor weakness is its inability to shift well between these several different modes or even to settle comfortably anywhere between them. Still, Ozick’s sharp sense of intellectual and cultural satire, coupled with her masterly pyrotechnic prose and distinctive gifts as a storyteller, keep the novel wise, charming, and imaginative. [Jeanne Claire van Ryzin]