Puddingstone goes to the heart of Boston’s “savage geography” in the last half of the Twentieth Century. Mark Jay Mirsky, whose Blue Hill Avenue was praised by The Boston Globe as “one of the 100 essential books about New England,” has concocted a hot pudding out of the simmering racial and ethnic animosities in the city. Centered in the districts around its historic Franklin Park, Jews, Irish, African Americans, Yankee bankers, and the last of its native Ponkapoag Indians, join in a general assault on the civic peace. In a battle during the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade and a riot in Charleston’s projects the smoldering resentments burst out but turn into a vision of Kabbalah and the Tain Bo Culaigne as the rabble of the city, together with its police, Cardinal, Mayor, psychiatrists, rabbis and reverends go at each other. Moments from the Irish cattle epics, 13th century mystical texts, Boston politics and gang wars flash against the skyline. The candied puddingstone, squeezed together by the retreating glaciers of a distant ice age, splits apart in the heat of this while the gates of the zoo and insane asylum open to rain madness on the city and dissolve it in Messianic fantasies.

Puddingstone’s events are filtered through the story of a Hebrew-school dropout, Maishe Ostropol, who returns to Boston and its suburbs as a popular Reform rabbi advocating new religious practices. The rabbi throws his congregation into turmoil then disappears on a tour with its Sisterhood of Jewish sites in Europe. When Maishe mysteriously finds his way back to his childhood neighborhood on Blue Hill Avenue and disappears into its Franklin Park, the city of Boston begins to shake with the birth pangs of Utopia.