First published 1998
Ruth Puttermesser sits in her New York apartment, surrounded by books, preferring Plato to her affair with married Morris Rappoport. She possesses vast learning but struggles with loneliness and unfulfilled desires. Her fantasies possess an unsettling power to manifest in reality, always with catastrophic results. Puttermesser longs for a daughter and creates the first female golem without assistance. Working in municipal government's bureaucratic depths, she dreams of urban reform and finds herself elected as mayor. She contemplates death and gets thrust into the afterlife, discovering that found paradise becomes lost paradise. Each fulfilled wish transforms into disaster, revealing the gap between imagination and lived experience. Puttermesser's story explores the collision between intellectual ambition and human need, between the world as it exists and the world as she envisions it.
Genres: literary-fiction, american-fiction, 20th-century, contemporary, adult-fiction, 21st-century, academic
Vibes: intimate, thought-provoking, whimsical
Tropes: found-family, magical-realism, unreliable-narrator
Setting: New York
Period: 20th-century, 21st-century
236 pages · Paperback · Vintage International