Cynthia Ozick’s The Puttermesser Papers is a novel assembled from five linked episodes in the life of Ruth Puttermesser: lawyer, intellectual, disappointed lover, accidental politician and, eventually, creator of a golem.

It begins in recognisable New York bureaucracy and keeps slipping sideways into Jewish folklore, metaphysics, civic fantasy and outright absurdity. Puttermesser is bookish to the point of pathology, as likely to be reading Plato in bed as attempting to reform municipal government; Ozick makes her intellectual life part of the action rather than decorative evidence that the character is clever.

The novel’s central conceit — Puttermesser inadvertently bringing a female golem into existence — lets Ozick worry at the old problem of utopia: what happens when an idea is given a body and told to improve the world? What initially looks like comic wish-fulfilment becomes stranger and more corrosive, particularly around power, desire, Jewish history and the fantasy that intelligence might somehow save us from human appetite. Dense, funny, learned without behaving like homework, and structurally eccentric. For readers who like fiction in which philosophy, myth and farce are permitted to wreck the furniture together.

Vintage, 2000. Paperback. Copyright Cynthia Ozick, 1997; first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 1999. Light shelf and edge wear to covers, minor corner wear and handling marks; pages lightly age-toned but clean. Binding sound.