The Puttermesser Papers

As you read this review, please bear in mind that The Puttermesser Papers really defies summarization. What I offer here can only be the most impoverished of overviews. The book must be read! Ruth Puttermesser is a woman, an attorney, living alone in New York City. Her mother, retired with her fathe......more

Flaubert's Epigraph The epigraph for Cynthia Ozick’s fourth novel is a quotation of a literary critic from Julian Barnes's novel “Flaubert's Parrot”. Barnes' subsequent comments are so scathing, it’s quite possible to read his novel, unaware that the ostensible source of the original quotation, Dr. E......more

Socially awkward spinster Ruth Puttermesser leads a kind of double life. Her career as a paper pushing attorney deeply ensconced in New York City's mammoth bureaucracy lies in stark contrast to her personal life as a kind of introverted intellectual with her head firmly stuck in the clouds. Both, I......more

Cynthia Ozick writes some truly beautiful prose. Her metaphors and turns of phrase are relentlessly unexpected and have the organic majesty of a garden gone wild. The book compiles five unconnected episodes from the life of Ruth Puttermesser, an introverted grotesquely over-educated Jewish civil ser......more