Book summary

An updating of DON QUIXOTE that transforms the mad knight of la Mancha into the first woman mayor of New York. Ruth Puttermesser is a depressed and rather forlorn civil servant in Manhattan who plods through the boring routine of her days at work by daydreaming of a rich and lively future in which she emerges as a successful politician. Through an elaborate sequence of events her fantasies become realities, and she is elected and serves as the most successful mayor the city has ever seen. Her triumphs begin to sour nearly as quickly as they flourished, however, and eventually Ruth begins to see that the relations between success and happiness are more tenuous than she had imagined.

Media reviews

"...Cynthia Ozick's fanciful, poignant, elegant new novel is a kind of Jewish magical realism brought to the normally earthbound spiritual territory of the Bronx and Manhattan....Her Ruth Puttermesser is a little bit like a Bellow character, a female Herzog or Sammler....'The Puttermesser Papers' is a strange little book, a slender monument to a vision that is stark and unsparing but at the same time so intelligent, so finely expressed, that, like its main character, it remains endearing, edifying, a spark of light in the gloom."