To anyone who loves ideas and words, this is a painful wisdom, and a doubtful one. Yet it is clearly true that mental virtuosity, however desirable a talent, is no guarantee of emotional satisfaction. She wins a lover who seems the fulfillment of her fantasy of an intellectual soul mate, a dream modeled on 19th century novelist George Eliot's love affair with George Lewes. But each fulfillment of a desire, whether on earth or in Paradise, seems in the end to bring new pain. Golems and soul mates betray our Puttermesser.
Edenic love fades away.
A Buddhist might say that desire itself is the problem, but Ozick's Puttermesser is so funny and lovely in her cravings. I will learn about the linkages of genes, about quarks, about primate sign language, theories of the origin of the races, religions of ancient civilizations, what Stonehenge meant. I will study Roman law, the more arcane varieties of higher mathematics, the nuclear composition of the stars, what happened to the Monophysites, Chinese history, Russian and Icelandic. Joan Smith, former book editor of the San Francisco Examiner, is a regular contributor to Salon.