Plot-wise, it's an account of the extraordinary career, life, death and afterlife of Ruth Puttermesser, a lawyer/public servant.city mayor/anonymous retiree dedicated to the idea of a life of the mind Jew in New York City; it also has a golem, life imitating art, fantasy indistinguishable from reality; it's a parable concerning art, society, desire, the imagination and paradise; and it's formally quite experimental, being related in the form of five, chronologically-ordered but only loosely connected, extended chapters detailing key episodes in Puttermesser's life. Put like that, it sounds pretty good, doesn't it? Here's the thing, though: I felt the whole time I was reading the novel that I wasn't giving it the attention and concentration that it deserved - but the reason for that neglect on my part was that the novel itself doesn't do enough to demand or earn such care on the reader's part.
Ozick can certainly write, but her crisp, wry, liberally-dotted-with-excursions-into-the-fantastic style is weighed down by a recurring preciousness and the suffocating blanket of over-intellectualism. Obviously, I don't mind a bit of preciousness or intellectualism, least of all in literature, but it really goes too far in The Puttermesser Papers - it requires a level of erudition to comprehend which is, quite frankly, ridiculous. So these comments need to be qualified by the recognition that, very possibly, I'm just not learned enough to 'get' the novel...even so, though if it were more compelling, I would've been more willing to dig into its complexities and make a real effort to unravel them - but, while Puttermesser is a memorable creation, The Puttermesser Papers is too disjointed and all over the place, and basically too unsatisfying, for it to seem worth that effort (I noticed that every single chapter/novella in it has been previously published, suggesting that maybe a certain unity of vision is lacking from the 'novel' I've read and possibly explaining why its constituent parts don't seem particularly well-integrated with one another). As it is, while the novel isn't without its virtues, I was disappointed by this one (I'd read the first few pages in a book store and thought them promising enough to remember the title and track it down in a library later).
