The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick (1997)

Last year, I became mildly obsessed with the concept of the dybbuk--in Jewish folklore, a ghost who haunts the body of another in order to finish business on Earth. Always one to guide my more fantastical leanings into more contemporary literary frames, Michelle Herman recommended I read The Puttermesser Papers, a collections of short novellas about Ruth Puttermesser, a Jewish New Yorker who is obsessed with George Eliot, who is briefly elected mayor with supernatural help, and who dies tragically, mundanely, and bitterly, only to wander the afterlife singing about her name, which means "butter knife." I began reading it last year, and finally, post-thesis, finished the final novella this summer. The novellas were originally published separately in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly and Salmagundi, but I can't quite imagine only reading one of them, and not the rest--there's a pattern to Puttermesser's life is that is most satisfying to see building throughout the chapters. She is constantly meeting with the dual forces of ecstasy and disappointment. By reading only one novella, a reader would miss seeing the effects of disappointment as they carry through into the subsequent piece, would miss seeing how what Ruth has learned about herself in the novella before affects the novella after, or, in some cases, doesn't. For example, in "Puttermesser and Xanthippe," it's not a dybbuk but a golem who helps Puttermesser reach the pinnacle of success as Mayor of NYC, and then who, of course, causes Puttermesser's downfall by sleeping around and endangering Puttermesser's reputation while gluttonously expanding her clay figure; and of course, this is a development that Ruth approaches with the resolve of someone who expected inevitable downfall, and who knows what must be done to fix things, even if fixing the situation means that she must destroy her own creation and leave her political career behind in the dust, to be forgotten. In Puttermesser's world, the greatest success and elation is followed only by matter-of-fact disappointment, but Ozick's assuring narrative voice doesn't let us stay bitter for long--when she asks herself "hey! Puttermesser's biographer! What will you do with her now?", I found myself anxiously awaiting the answer, no matter what Ruth had just suffered. Onto the next inevitable heartbreak.

--Cate