Just finished Ozick’s Puttermesser Papers which resists summary reaction. Every page thrills – the vigor of language, the wildness of story, Ozick’s raging intellect. The story is told in parts – Puttermesser, a promising young lawyer goes the way of public servant, fades, is enlivened by a golem that she accidentally brings into life, a daughter-creature who wills the office of mayor for Puttermesser, her master, only to lay utter waste to Puttermesser’s life. Part two sees Puttermesser take on a young man who is willing to reenact the love life of George Eliot with her, an experiment that yields only heartbreak. Part three finds Puttermesser giving shelter to a young Soviet cousin whose vitality is no more alien for aging Puttermesser than life outside her apartment. Finally, death in the most gruesome way imaginable. And in the sprawl of those story lines, precision, unflagging energy.
I’m not sure what to liken the book to, only that the fragments make for a wrenching whole, a record of a woman 's life made from shorted relationships and whose ambitions cannot be independent of those relationships. No wonder the prose rages. But then, perhaps it’s just the way I’ve read it.
Ozick in the Paris Review, “I read in order to find out what
I need to know: To illuminate the riddle.”
She also mentions that she turned to short stories for fear
of falling into hugeness.
Finally, this: “The secret contemplative self. An inner recess
wherein insights occur. This writer’s self is perhaps coextensive with one of
the writer’s sentences. It seems to me that more can be found about a writer in
any single sentence in a work of fiction, say, than in five or ten full-scale
biographies.”
She did the interview sitting across from the interviewer, typing her responses out on a type-writer.
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