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With dashing originality and in prose that sings like an entire choir of sirens, Cynthia Ozick relates the life and times of her most compelling fictional creation. Ruth Puttermesser lives in New York City. Her learning is monumental. Her love life is minimal (she prefers pouring through Plato to romping with married Morris Rappoport). And her fantasies have a disconcerting tendency to come true - with disastrous consequences for what we laughably call "reality."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

"...Cynthia Ozick's fanciful, poignant, elegant new novel is a kind of Jewish magical realism brought to the normally earthbound spiritual territory of the Bronx and Manhattan....Her Ruth Puttermesser is a little bit like a Bellow character, a female Herzog or Sammler....'The Puttermesser Papers' is a strange little book, a slender monument to a vision that is stark and unsparing but at the same time so intelligent, so finely expressed, that, like its main character, it remains endearing, edifying, a spark of light in the gloom."

Richard Bernstein, New York Times, 06/11/1997

"Cynthia Ozick has an amphibious talent. She is interested in ideas to the extent that they yield stories and stories to the extent that they yield ideas. Literary intellectuals (''Wait'll you meet him!'' one Ozick character crows. ''He's got this mind'') may groan when the novelist in Ms. Ozick intrudes on the critic. Lovers of pure story may sigh when the critic breaks the novelist's spell. But others read Ms. Ozick for the fun of just this double-crossing. Her latest book, 'The Puttermesser Papers,' is a crazy delight, like Chris Burden's sculpture ''The Flying Steamroller.'' Its author doesn't fall between two stools, she floats there."

Jack Miles, New York Times Book Review, 06/15/1997

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