What a strange book! I've never read anything quite like it, and it's worth reading for the novelty alone. It's very self-consciously a book about creating character, which I found pretty interesting but which might be irritating if you're not into that sort of thing. While each of the sections has a sort of plot, this isn't a novel in the conventional sense, which again is pretty fun if you're ok with that sort of thing but might be a let-down for readers into more traditional novels. I liked it a lot and will read more by Ozick. ( )

I don't know why I'm coming back to this like over a decade later, but I remember reading this in high school and thinking, "What the f*** did I just read???" It was real and then it was fantasy...and I had no idea what any of it meant.

I was, however, fascinated by the idea of a golem, which was new to me at the time. In any case, I should like to give this one another read and see what I think of it now. ( )

Meh. I think this book is smarter than I am. And it may have taught me a vocabulary word or two. But I didn't enjoy it at all, and last night, finally reaching the last section (Puttermesser in Paradise), I read a few pages and did the unthinkable---I put it down with less than 20 pages left, and with no intention of reading to the end. This "novel" consists of five sections, each of which seems to stand alone, and to have nothing much to do with the others beyond the common character of Ruth Puttermesser. When we meet Ruth, she is a middle aged lawyer stuck in a dull bureaucratic job in the City of New York. After some political shuffling she ends up buried even deeper in the dusty files, on the clear path to termination. Her married lover walks out on her because she would rather read Socrates than frolic in bed when she knows their time together is limited. One night she subconsciously creates a golem from the dirt in her many potted plants. This section was a bit of fun of the magical realism variety, and although I couldn't warm up to Ruth, I thought the book might be going somewhere interesting as her fortunes rose and fell (possibly only in her imagination) with the machinations of her supernatural creation. But the next section took Ruth into a peculiar relationship with a much younger man, a relationship she attempted to mold into a recreation of that between George Eliot and George Lewes. The results were as predictably disastrous as releasing a golem in New York City had been. And this is where I really should have cut my losses and moved on. I continued to dislike Ruth, in the sense that there is nothing likeable about her, not that she is offensive or wicked or stupid; she's just an unfocused, over-educated bore. I also disliked that the author refers to her primarily as "Puttermesser", although it does describe her rather well---a butter knife, utilitarian, but useless, really. The separate parts, which I believe were all first published individually (each section a "paper"), fail to coalesce into a whole for me. Granted there are many allusions I'm missing the point of, my grasp of ancient history and mythology being slight, and naturally I cannot blame the author for that. But what was she getting at? What's it all for? The book is meant to be "comic in tone", apparently. While a couple bits of the golem story were amusing, overall I didn't see much humor in it, particularly in the final section as Ruth faces a distinctly unfunny end to her life on earth.

The book was a National Book Award finalist; it's on a list of 101 Great Jewish novels and the New York Times Best Books of the Year list. It didn't work for me. Your mileage may vary significantly. ( )

A series of short stories with Ruth Puttermesser as its main character. Funny at times and serious at others and also quite profound. A reader should be well read because of all the references, mostly to classic novels and writers, the beginner will miss a lot of these. ( )

Loved the first half, especially the golem story. Ruth Puttermesser unwittingly fantasized into existence a daughter golem, and finished sculpting it with her hands. This was terrific writing. I think I would like it way more, on a whole different level, if I knew anything at all about Jewish religion/culture. The second half sagged badly for me. By now both the story and I had split far apart in widely divergent directions, and pretty much weren't communicating. ( )