MILLICENT l3ELL
55
Tile
PlItteYII/esse/' Papc/'s
is a dancing combination of straight and
"magic" realism, of actual and pretended authorial self-reference and self–
consciousness. [Jut witty and astonishing as they are, the "papers" seem to
compose a grim allegory signifYing the defeat of various idealisms which
Ozick herself may once have cherished.
It
is not an "optimistic portrait."
The character with the ridiculous name of l3utter Knife is a defeated pil–
grim.
In
the most astonishing of the stories, "Puttermesser and
Xanthippe," Puttcrl11esscr makes a golem, like the famous rabbis of old, but
she is herself a kind of golem created by her own maker to work tempo–
rary wonders until shc is compclled to subside into dust.
Puttermesser, who is and looks Jewish-she would not be invited to
pose for a Breck Shampoo ad, she reminds us-begins by reading the hard–
est books, getting thc best m;lrks in law school, going to work in a
prestigious WASP law tlrm. Soon she discovers that she will never rise
above a drudge's status in the back office. Having better f.1ith in the fair–
ness of a democracy's civil service, she enters the City's f)epartment of
Receipts and f)isburscmcnts and labors in its Kafka-like warren of
bureaucratic complications and futilities. Here, too, she fails to progress and
is arbitrarily demoted .
In
addition, she is jilted by her married lover
because she reads in bed. [Jut as "Puttermesser and Xanthippe" relates, she
finds a naked girl in hcr apartment one day, a creature she discovers to be
a golem she has unknowingly created. With the golem's help, she is elect–
ed Mayor and transforms New York. "Gangs of youths have invaded the
subway yards at night and washed the cars clean .... In their high secret
pride, the slums undo themeslvcs . ...The ex-pimps are learning computer
skills." l3ut this paradise on earth must soon decay. The golem's own lust
and ambition get out of hand-and Puttermesser destroys her.
Later stories return to the realism of the opening and reinforce the
pessimism of the X;lIlthippe story as one or another of Puttermesser's
beliefs is shown to be flllacious. Middle-aged Puttermesser does not seem
to
have ever made a gokm but merely retired as a municipal civil servant.
She falls in love with a painter who copies works in the Metropolitan
Museum, and she tries to enact with him the union of George Eliot and
George Henry Lewes. [Jut her
lover
replicates instead the role of John
Cross,
to
whom Eliot was briefly married after Lewes' death and who
attempted suicide. The moral in this odd affair may concern the dangers of
imitation, whether of art or others' actuality, or merely, perhaps, the likely
failure of idealized relationships . A more successful, very funny story casts
into the dustbin Puttermesser's sentimental
view
of the Soviet Jew. She
takes in a refugee Russian cousin who turns out to be neither pathetic vic–
tim nor freedom fighter but a savvy beauty who makes money selling
Lenin meda ls and other souvenirs of the land fi'olll which she has fled and
