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It's been announced in many quarters lately that this season has witnessed a late flowering of our major Jewish-American writers. Saul Bellow's novella The Actual, Norman Mailer's The Gospel According to the Son and, most important by far, Philip Roth's American Pastoral have appeared in a rush. Bellow, Roth, and Bernard Malamud (when he was alive) were once known as the Hart, Schaffner & Marx of the trade, but Cynthia Ozick has never been up for partner in the family firm. I suspect that her reputation has been diminished somehow by her rather tight political and personal association with the old Commentary crowd. Too tough on the Israel question, that Ozick woman! What is she? Some kind of reactionary? It is also possible that Ozick has been slighted because she has written so few novels. Only the early Trust has bulk, and it is her least glorious.
With her new novel, The Puttermesser Papers, Ozick is a little late for this gaudy spring display, yet the novel deserves abundant praise. And since it is Ozick's first fiction in a decade, celebration is in order, too. The Puttermesser Papers is described by its author and publisher as a novel; the meticulous will point out that two of the five chapters appeared in the collection Levitation 15 years ago and that four of the five have appeared as stories in The New Yorker and Salmagundi. What's more, the five chapters lack the novel's customary quality of having been ironed together; not all the material lies quite flat and smooth. They are linked stories as much as a novel. As if to inoculate herself against just such an attack, Ozick wryly takes as her epigraph Enid Starkie's disapproving comment that Flaubert "does not build up his characters, as did Balzac, by objective, external description; in fact, so careless is he of their outward appearance that on one occasion he gives Emma brown eyes; on another deep black eyes; and on another blue eyes."
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 ut apart from the trifling question of labeling, The Puttermesser Papers is thrilling and original. Ozick's world contains the dreamy air of the library, the grit of upper Broadway, and the caked mud of the golem--the clay android of Jewish folklore. If she has a model, it is not Hart, Schaffner & Marx, it is the master of Upper West Side mysticism, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Her fiction routinely moves from earth to heaven and back again. We learn of her hero's molar-eroding passion for fudge and her experience of the beyond; we learn of her ordinary disasters--the dreariness of her work, the failure and boredom of her love life, her loneliness--but also get a sense of her inner life, the way her voracious reading deepens her interior world but also sets her up for great disappointment in the here and now.
The book opens with an exposition of Ruth Puttermesser, Ozick's most vivid and developed fictional character to date. Ruth lives on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx (later she will move to Manhattan). She is unmarried and no longer young--a fact her mother is quick to remind her of in Portnoyan letters from retirement in Florida. She works as a highly efficient and badly paid bureaucrat in one of the more obscure city agencies. At night she studies and reads. She even dreams of reading: In Eden she will consume the Faerie Queene and the Dmitri Merezhkovski trilogy. "She will study Roman law, the more arcane varieties of higher mathematics, the nuclear composition of the stars, what happened to the Monophysites, Chinese history, Russian, and Icelandic." Ozick's essays are filled with a Cynthia Ozick who lives in the texts of Eliot, James, and Trollope, and in Ruth the portrait of the reader as a middle-aged woman is just as charming and twice as deep. Reading gives Ruth her language, her inner life, and even a night life that stands in counterpoint to the boredom she endures day to day. When Ruth thinks about marrying, she thinks of the idyllic intellectual companionship of George Eliot and George Lewes and their long nights reading to one another.
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 erhaps the most delicious of the five chapters is the second, "Puttermesser and Xanthippe," in which Ruth is jilted by her lover, a rather dim (and married) fund-raiser named Morris Rappoport. At work, a new commissioner in her department has decided to make a political lollipop of her position, and Ruth is shoved into a job well below her considerable competence. She has suffered a fall. When she arrives back at her apartment she discovers that a strange and filthy naked girl is in her bed. After a while, she realizes that this is no junkie or prostitute, but a golem. Slowly, she begins to help form this golem, this double: "It was clear that the nostrils needed pinching to bring them closer together, so Puttermesser tentatively pinched. The improvement was impressive. She blew into the left nostril to get rid of a tuft of dust; it solidified and rolled out like a clay bead. With squeamish deliberation she pushed the nose in line with the middle space where the eyebrows ought to have been."
The golem grows and grows--as golems do--and along the way helps elect Ruth mayor of New York. Together they create a kind of paradise:
The subways have been struck by beauty. Lustrous tunnels unfold, mile after mile. Gangs of youths have invaded the subway yards at night and have washed the cars clean ... Each car shines like a bullet ... A little-known poet who specializes in terza-rima is put in charge of Potter's Field. For each sad burial there, she composes a laudatory ode; even the obscure dead are not expendable or forlorn. ... Nothing is broken, nothing is despoiled. No harm comes to anything or anyone.
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 ventually the golem must die, and so, too, must paradise and the reign of Ruth Puttermesser. In later chapters, Ruth marries her literary soul mate (badly), Ruth takes in a cousin from Moscow (with mixed results), and Ruth dies. In all, the work is magical in the way of Singer's stories and in the way of Ozick's own best work, including The Shawl, Bloodshed, and The Messiah of Stockholm--creating a reality out of the city and Jewish folklore, Foley Square and the golem.
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