The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick, 1997

Following the paper theme, The Puttermesser Papers are linked stories of erasure. Ruth Puttermesser is a woman, a Jew, and a lawyer living in New York City during the late 20th century. The first two stories track her professional life’s dissolution. The third story dismantles her personal relations, the forth story her ideals, and the final story her life.

The summary suggests Ozick is a puppet master, in that sense she reminds me of Nabokov. But Nabokov looked at the world as a poet, and Ozick looks at the world as a theologian. When Puttermesser’s loses her municipal position through political machinations, she creates a golem, who becomes her campaign manager and gets her elected mayor. The flight to magical (or theological) realism undercuts the here and now, or moves it to a different place and time, depending on your point of view. I entered this book cold, based on a suggestion that it’s a clear-eyed view of municipal politics on a par with Caro’s biography of Robert Moses. It didn’t take too long to figure out municipal politics isn’t deeply or interestingly embedded in the story, and if it is being clear-eyed, it’s looking at something a lot like smoke.