Meet Mazie Phillips: big-hearted and bawdy, she’s the truth-telling proprietress of The Venice, the famed New York City movie theater. It’s the Jazz Age, with romance and booze aplenty–even when Prohibition kicks in–and Mazie never turns down a night on the town. But her high spirits mask a childhood rooted in poverty, and her diary, always close at hand, holds her dearest secrets. When the … When the Great Depression hits, Mazie’s life is on the brink of transformation. Addicts and bums roam the Bowery; homelessness is rampant. If Mazie won’t help them, then who? When she opens the doors of The Venice to those in need, this ticket taking, fun-time girl becomes the beating heart of the Lower East Side, and in defining one neighborhood helps define the city.
Then, more than ninety years after Mazie began her diary, it’s discovered by a documentarian in search of a good story. Who was Mazie Phillips, really? A chorus of voices from the past and present fill in some of the mysterious blanks of her adventurous life.
Inspired by the life of a woman who was profiled in Joseph Mitchell’s classic Up in the Old Hotel, Saint Mazie is infused with Jami Attenberg’s signature wit, bravery, and heart. Mazie’s rise to “sainthood”–and her irrepressible spirit–is unforgettable.
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It’s hard to find a historical novel where the leading lady’s accomplishments overshadow her love life. What’s even harder is to find a historical novel based on an original, vibrant, and bold woman who really existed. Jami Attenberg does both of these things with Saint Maize.
I had never read a novel by Attenberg before, but the premise completely drew me in. Mazie Phillips ran the ticket booth at The Venice movie theatre during the 1930s. She liked men, drinking, and late nights on the town. She was also an incredibly compassionate woman known for helping the homeless during the Great Depression. Saint Mazie brings this complex and one-of-a-kind woman vividly to life. Told in an unique format, the novel presents itself as selected interviews from people who knew Mazie as well as diary entries from the woman herself. I completely fell in love with this novel, its format, and the incredible Mazie Phillips.
There is an honesty to Saint Mazie that is just irresistible. It is a raw and rich story that will have you loving Maize Phillips just as much for her vices as for her virtues.
Mazie Phillips – orphan, lush, unlucky in love, successful businesswoman, humanitarian, possible saint – chronicles the life and times of the Lower East Side circa 1910-1935 in the pages of her treasured diary. She records what she sees and what she feels, how the city around her changes, and how those around her are changed by it. Her world is peopled with cops and nuns, bums and working stiffs, criminals and the mentally ill. Through the pages of her diary, which has been lost and now found some 90 years later, the reader comes to know Mazie in all her glory.
I discovered Jami Attenberg’s Saint Mazie in the BBC’s, Ten Books to Read in June. From the article’s description, “Attenberg brings [Mazie] to life primarily through her fictional diaries…she also weaves in sections from her unpublished autobiography and fictitious oral history accounts from people who knew her,” I expected Saint Mazie to be a bit like Lovers at the Chameleon Club. In that sense, I was disappointed.
The various pieces do not fit together nearly as well as they do in Francine Prose’s magnificent novel. I had a hard time separating the contemporary voices. Elio Ferrante, Philip Tekverk, Pete Sorensen, and Vera Sung, are a handful of the people who give accounts to the “author” of Mazie’s life. Yet they run together and mostly seemed unnecessary. In contrast, George Flicker and Lydia Wallach’s accounts help move the story forward.
What Attenberg does do very, very well is to bring a place to life. The pages of Saint Mazie pulse with the life of a New York that does not exist anymore: tenements, speakeasies, immigrants, in short, the entire Lower East Side existence. It is the most place-driven book I have read in a long time; what happens here could not have happened anywhere else. In many ways, this book reminded me of a cross between the hopefulness of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and the desperation of My Notorious Life.
Although it starts rather slowly, Saint Mazie slowly yet surely sank its hook into me and, once I was hooked, I had to know what happened next and next and next. Attenberg’s characters defy easy categorization; in the end it is difficult to want anything but that elusive ephemeral thing called happiness for each of them.
Lovers of historical fiction, place-based literature, and the American experience should especially enjoy this novel.
(This review was originally published at http://www.thisyearinbooks.com/2015/06/saint-mazie.html)