An Intelligent Woman

The Puttermesser Papers 

by Cynthia Ozick

“She was an attachment trailing along - an impediment - but it seemed to Puttermesser there was another purpose to this clumsy caravan. A kind of mental heat ran through the rod that linked them. He had decided to clip the two of them together for a little time. She understood that she had happened on an original. A mimic with a philosophy! A philosophy that denied mimicry! And he wasn't mistaken, he wasn't a lunatic. He was, just as he said, someone with a new idea.”  ―  Cynthia Ozick

While The Puttermesser Papers is considered a novel, it could also be considered a collection of short stories, as each of the five "chapters" were published previously in various magazines before being brought together in the form of a single novel. What could have been a straightforward biographical novel becomes, as Ozick creates a complex, many-layered tale, a fantastic exploration both of literary genres and of a single woman’s life in late 20th-century New York. Because this one fundamental “fact” is challenged, the reader realizes they cannot take any single item at face value.

The story chronicles the life of the imaginary Ruth Puttermesser, through her adult life and into her death and afterlife. She is an intelligent Jewish woman who lives in New York City. Ruth grew up in the Bronx, New York, in a Jewish family. Ruth was a very smart, bookish girl who apparently became interested in the law through studying Hebrew with her uncle—or so the reader thinks, until another voice intrudes into the narrative to tell the reader that Ruth never knew this uncle.

Each chapter chronicles the fulfillment of a desire, whether on earth or in Paradise, but each seems in the end to bring new pain. In one chapter the book takes on the quality of a traditional Jewish fable when Ruth, in her sleep, creates a golem. In another her interest in 19th-century novelist George Eliot turns into an obsession; moreover, the salient part of that obsession is imagining that she will find her perfect soulmate, as Eliot had in George Lewes. But the golem and soul mates betray our Puttermesser. Edenic love fades away. 

Ruth Puttermesser embodies several themes.  She is an apparently successful, single career woman who decides she needs more in her life than her work as an attorney can provide.  In an attempt to balance the romantic and the pragmatic aspects of life Ruth veers over to the romantic, and even fantastic, side.  Ruth believes that one obstacle to finding true love is the shallowness of the New York social milieu in which she travels. The beauty of the prose and the challenges facing the heroine merge to maintain the reader's interest.  Cynthia Ozick's prose style displays an intelligent writer who is fun to read.