The Land of Ozick: Navigating Puttermesser's Precincts

• Published in: Forward (New York, N.Y.) Vol. CI; no. 31,137
• Main Author: Potok, Chaim
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, N.Y The Forward Association, Inc 20.06.1997
• Subjects: Literature; Ozick, Cynthia
• ISSN: 1051-340X

The manner of "The Puttermesser Papers" (and of most tales in the Land of Ozick) is often quite overwhelming. One is hypnotized, enchanted, engaged by language. A beginning traveler may weary of so filigreed a manner: those heaps of triadic nouns, adjectives, verbs ("the cubicle of her demotion, denigration, disgrace"; "a forceful sense of the penultimate, the tentative, the imperiled"; "she is waiting for...some conclusion, or revolution, or unfolding"; "Mobs bubble, babble, guffaw," "she recognized tulips, red, yellow, and white"); those jungle-thick, zoom-lens observations ("They had already had careers as oligarchs of street-sweeping, sewers and drains, gutters, the perils of sleet, ice, rainslant, gas, vermin, fumigation, disinfection, snow removal, water supply, potholes, steam cleaning, deodorization, ventilation"); these prose flights that seem to be forcing us out of the frame of reference that is the page ("In Paradise Puttermesser is happy, oh happy! -- in her sexual parts, in the golden beauty of her child, in the gold of Plato's eyes, and in the newest heat of her mind, which is everything it had not been at nineteen. In Paradise Emil whispers to her about her mind: how impressive, how effective, her thinking is. He kisses her little finger and calls her a Satrap of Thought. He calls Kant the Emperor of Thought. He calls Beethoven the God of Thought.").