Saint Mazie [a novel]

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 The novel, her fourth, consists of Mazie's diary entries, peppered with bits of her unpublished memoir and snippets of interviews with people who knew her.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.