My2cents
02-18-2011, 05:09 PM
I've been aware of Cynthia Ozick since she published The Messiah of Stockholm in 1987, but I never bothered to give her the time of day -- until now. It's a folly I may compensate for by reading her corpus in its entirety which amounts to 21 books.
She is that good. There isn't a sentence in The Puttermesser Papers that doesn't resonate, not a paragraph or passage that feels like padding. The story itself is the biography of Ruth Puttermesser, a capable civil servant when we first meet her who is also Jewish, middle aged, unmarried, and not especially pretty. Three major characters cross her path -- three characters whose phantasmagoric elements aren't so gratuitous or so drawn out as to make their appeal or plausibility an issue. Indeed, as soon as Ozick has Puttermesser dispatch of the golem (which golem had made Puttermesser the finest mayor the city of New York has ever had only to ruin Puttermesser's chances of ever serving a second term), we have this gem of an observation that anyone who has ever lived in an apartment infested with cockroaches cannot help but to empathize with.
There had been, she observed, a hatching: a crowd of baby roaches milled under the ray of her flashlight, then fled with purposeful intelligence. In God's littlest, the urge toward being and enduring; a soulless mite wills its continuity with the force and fury of our own mammoth human longing. O life, O philosophy!
All the same, Puttermesser sprayed.
The second major character who crosses Puttermesser's life is a "reenactment artist", a man 20 years her junior, who befriends her, proposes to her, marries her only to leave her at the point of consummation, reenacting the love life of George Eliot vis a vis Johnny Cross. This phase of the story in tandem with the one preceding it, involving the golem, can be supposed (or at least I did) as having occurred strictly in Puttermesser's mind. Lastly, there is the refugee from Soviet Russia, Puttermesser's niece I think it was, who, despite what one might think , turns out to be more money savvy and progressive than Puttermesser, the New York liberal. Like the golem and the reenactment artist, the niece occupies the story like a streaking meteor and like the meteor just as quickly vanishes, leaving only one thing left untold: Puttermesser's death.
And what a death it is! Think of an apartment dweller (Ozick) marveling at the persistence of the lowly cockroach (Puttermesser) only to reach for her can of Raid and....
She is that good. There isn't a sentence in The Puttermesser Papers that doesn't resonate, not a paragraph or passage that feels like padding. The story itself is the biography of Ruth Puttermesser, a capable civil servant when we first meet her who is also Jewish, middle aged, unmarried, and not especially pretty. Three major characters cross her path -- three characters whose phantasmagoric elements aren't so gratuitous or so drawn out as to make their appeal or plausibility an issue. Indeed, as soon as Ozick has Puttermesser dispatch of the golem (which golem had made Puttermesser the finest mayor the city of New York has ever had only to ruin Puttermesser's chances of ever serving a second term), we have this gem of an observation that anyone who has ever lived in an apartment infested with cockroaches cannot help but to empathize with.
There had been, she observed, a hatching: a crowd of baby roaches milled under the ray of her flashlight, then fled with purposeful intelligence. In God's littlest, the urge toward being and enduring; a soulless mite wills its continuity with the force and fury of our own mammoth human longing. O life, O philosophy!
All the same, Puttermesser sprayed.
The second major character who crosses Puttermesser's life is a "reenactment artist", a man 20 years her junior, who befriends her, proposes to her, marries her only to leave her at the point of consummation, reenacting the love life of George Eliot vis a vis Johnny Cross. This phase of the story in tandem with the one preceding it, involving the golem, can be supposed (or at least I did) as having occurred strictly in Puttermesser's mind. Lastly, there is the refugee from Soviet Russia, Puttermesser's niece I think it was, who, despite what one might think , turns out to be more money savvy and progressive than Puttermesser, the New York liberal. Like the golem and the reenactment artist, the niece occupies the story like a streaking meteor and like the meteor just as quickly vanishes, leaving only one thing left untold: Puttermesser's death.
And what a death it is! Think of an apartment dweller (Ozick) marveling at the persistence of the lowly cockroach (Puttermesser) only to reach for her can of Raid and....