Review by New York Times Review
THE STORY OF a Jazz Age party girl who winds up in a cage as a ticket-taker in a Depression-era Lower East Side movie theater, Jami Attenberg's "Saint Mazie" is full of love and drink and dirty sex and nobility and beef stew. As its starting point, this historical novel takes Joseph Mitchell's 1940 New Yorker profile of the real Mazie Gordon, who had "the roughest tongue and the softest heart in the Third Precinct." After spending up to 13 hours a day selling tickets from her cage at the Venice Theater, near the southern tip of the Bowery, the real Mazie would go into the night to help the "bums" and "stiffs" (her words) sleeping on the streets. She'd hand out soap and quarters, pay for flophouses and call ambulances. Attenberg takes Mitchell's witty, colorful piece and spins it into something equally lively and new. The novel, her fourth, consists of Mazie's diary entries, peppered with bits of her unpublished memoir and snippets of interviews with people who knew her. The conceit is that a present-day documentary filmmaker (whose own voice we never hear) has gotten hold of the diary and become consumed with learning who this foul-mouthed, funny, endlessly kind person was. The filmmaker interviews a childhood neighbor of Mazie's on Grand Street; a great-granddaughter of the Venice Theater manager; the son of the feckless sea captain with whom Mazie had a longtime on-again-off-again thing; and a pretentious publisher who learned about Mazie from Fannie Hurst, a real-life best-selling novelist of the day ("obviously quite mainstream, and not particularly literary," he sniffs). We also hear from the hipster musician turned hipster shop owner in Red Hook who found the diary, and from a high school history teacher who helps the documentarian in her research. (These last two, alas, sometimes feel a little reminiscent of Basil Exposition from "Austin Powers," ploddingly putting Mazie's inner life and historical background in context. Minor annoyance.) All together, the book feels like one of those tasty oral histories of "The Simpsons" or "Saturday Night Live," but with just one delightful person at the center. The Mazie who emerges from this multivoiced clutter truly is a wonder. She's sometimes bitter about being trapped in her cage - which is gradually papered with postcards from her peripatetic dancer sister and her charming, unreliable lover - but she manages to find beauty everywhere. "I don't know if I ever need to see a mountain in person, but I like knowing they're out there," she reflects about a postcard from the captain. "I've been turning and looking at it all day. I don't know why, but it gave me a kind of faith in the world." She cares less about the card's other side. "His words are so slippery they might slide right off the paper," she notes. No fool she. And even in her cage, she engages with the world. "I thought: No one else can see this sky like I can. No one else sits here and watches it change all day except for me. I see the snow and I see the clouds and it is all a show for me. Everything is for me." The book is full of great one-liners (Attenberg is amazing on Twitter), and reading it is nothing like reading "The Middlesteins," Attenberg's previous book. The Middlesteins are a family of self-deluding people treating one another horridly. Mazie knows herself. She does good without being a simp. She makes sainthood seem not only attainable, but seductive. 'I don't know if I ever need to see a mountain in person, but I like knowing they're out there.' MARJORIE INGALL is a columnist for Tablet magazine. She is writing a book about Jewish mothers.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 22, 2015]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Attenberg's (The Middlesteins) new novel is based on the WWI- and Depression-era life of Mazie Phillips, Queen of the Bowery (and subject of a famous Joseph Mitchell New Yorker profile). The story unfolds mostly through diary entries, but also snippets from an unpublished autobiography (fictional, like the diary entries) and recollections of those who met or knew of the woman who, according to her New York Times obit, "passed out advice, money, and sympathy" to men who lost their livelihoods and dignity during the 1930s. Her coarseness of voice is on display as she tells her life story, eventually being taken in by Rosie and Louis Gordon, her older sister and brother-in-law. Louis owns legitimate businesses-such as the theater Mazie runs-but in all likelihood is a loan shark. Meanwhile, Rosie's demons force the family to move throughout New York City. As for Mazie, the good-time girl is also a woman who cares deeply about the less fortunate, and this plays out most endearingly in her friendship with a pious nun. In the book's final quarter, Mazie wanders the streets handing out change and calling ambulances for people, a pattern that seems emblematic of a difficult time, painting a vivid picture of life during the Depression. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This character-driven novel was inspired by a real-life character: Depression-era New Yorker Mazie Gordon. Mazie is a bold, lively gal whose primary love story is with the streets of the city and its people. She is big-hearted and imperfect, and her moral development unfolds in ways that are complex, unflinching, and moving. The novel is a collage of Gordon's own diary, a late-in-life autobiography, and interviews conducted with various people from her life, all brought together by a present-day documentarian who is researching Mazie's life. On audio, Tavia Gilbert breathes life into Mazie's words in a bold, exuberant way and is unafraid to act out some of the racier scenes of the book. -Verdict While Mazie's diary entries and the mysteries surrounding her history are more successful than the underdeveloped secondary story line of the filmmaker, this is a fun listen for lovers of great characters and New York City and for fans of historical fiction of this era. ["A very enjoyable novel with great character, this work will be of particular interest to fans of women's fiction...and historical fiction set during World War I, Prohibition, and the Great Depression": LJ Xpress Reviews 6/12/15 review of the Grand Central hc.]-Heather Malcolm, Bow, WA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Early 20th-century New York and its denizens portrayed through the fictional diary of a nonfictional heroine.Mazie Phillips was a real person, a rough-and-ready Mother Theresa who walked the streets of Lower Manhattan in the early 1930s, giving out money for food, buying drinks, calling ambulances. She was profiled by New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell in an essay collected in Up in the Old Hotel (1992), which is how Attenberg (The Middlesteins, 2013, etc.) came to know of her. Attenberg's fictional Mazie begins a diary she will keep for 32 years on Nov. 1, 1907, with this entry: "Today is my birthday. I am ten. You are my present." Born in Boston, Mazie now lives in New York with her older sister Rosie, who has rescued her and another sister from their parents, "a rat" and "a simp." Rosie's husband, Louis Gordon, owns a cinema, and at 21, Mazie begins her long career as ticket-seller. A free-thinking, hard-drinking gal who never marries or has children, Mazie carries on an intermittent, lifelong affair with a sea captain. Their first tryst, on the Brooklyn Bridge, is described in the diary with characteristic blunt eloquence. "We pecked at each other for a minute, figuring each other out. Finally he kissed my upper lip, and then my lower lip....He put his tongue where he liked. I could not argue. I did not even try." Mazie's voice is the most successful thing in this book. Perhaps we didn't need Nadine, the fictional documentarian who puts her story together, adding excerpts of interviews with the sea captain's son, Mazie's now-ancient neighbor, and the great-granddaughter of the theater manager. A particularly odd subplot has the man who supposedly found the diary making a play for Nadine. Too much concept and not enough story, but Mazie might win your heart anyway with her tough-talking mensch-iness. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
