Saint Mazie
Jami Attenberg, 2015
Grand Central Publishing
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781455599899
Summary
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 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, Jami Attenberg's Saint Mazie is infused with Jami's wit, bravery, and heart. Mazie's rise to "sainthood"—and her irrepressible spirit—is unforgettable. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1971
• Raised—Buffalo Grove, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., John Hopkins University
• Currently—lives in New Orleans, Louisiana
Jami Attenberg is an American writer of fiction and essays. She grew up in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, and is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University with a degree in Writing.
Her early works were published in numerous zines and in a 2003 chapbook called Deli Life. Her first book, Instant Love, a collection of interconnected short stories, was published in 2006. That work has been followed by a series of novels:
2008 - The Kept Man
2010 - The Melting Season
2012 - The Middlesteins
2015 - Saint Mazie
2017 - All Grown Up
2019 - All This Could Be Yours
Attenberg's work has appeared in a number of anthologies and magazines, including Nerve and The New York Times. She lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Adapted from Wikipedia. First retrieved 10/28/2012.)
Book Reviews
Full of love and drink and dirty sex and nobility.... Attenberg takes Mitchell's witty, colorful piece and spins it into something equally lively and new.
New York Times Book Review
[F]resh and witty.... Saint Mazie looks deep into the spirit of generosity. Jami Attenberg's Mazie lives a very big life in a very small space, turning her darkest experiences into something inspiring.
Wall Street Journal
Attenberg is a nimble and inventive storyteller with a particular knack for getting at the heart of outsized characters.... [she] proves her chops as a historical novelist by perfectly capturing Mazie's jazz-age voice, which ranges from clipped and vulgar to melancholy and lyrical. Attenberg also sidesteps many of the pitfalls of the form: no day-by-day plodding through the decades, no unedited research notes masquerading as dialogue. She resists any plot twist or final revelation to provide a tidy psychological explanation for Mazie Phillips-Gordon sainthood.
Washington Post
Delightful . . . [an] often ebullient tale about the simple pleasures of a working life.... Thanks to the wonderful Jami Attenberg (with an assist from the legendary Joseph Mitchell) Mazie does live on, an actual 20th century New York City saint.
NPR
Attenberg captures Mazie's voice so vividly you can close the book and still hear her talking. She is a tremendous achievement.... [A] bold, magnificent book about family, altruism, women and freedom, as well as a love letter to New York and a timely social manifesto for the 21st century.
Guardian (UK)
Attenberg's style, at turns lyrical and blunt, is a strong match for Mazie.... This voice-pleasantly tinged with jazz age argot, refreshingly modern in its honesty, and always intimate-is Attenberg's great achievement in Saint Mazie.... [A] boisterous, deep, provocative book.
Boston Globe
The real-life Mazie first appeared in a 1940 New Yorker profile by Joseph Mitchell and later again in his seminal collection, Up in the Old Hotel. Now Mazie's latest, and perhaps more powerful incarnation, is in the novel Saint Mazie by Jami Attenberg. Here Mazie continues to grab the lapels and hearts of readers—and we are all the more glad for the shake-up she gives us.... Achieves immortality in the minds and hearts of readers.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
[I]ngeniously constructed.... An attentive character study that also happens to be rich in city lore and period detail, Saint Mazie is an edifying, companionable and moving novel.
Kansas City Star
Attenberg has an impressive ability to capture unique voices and make these characters authentic and distinctive.... [T]he voices in Saint Mazie ring out and linger, bringing to life this specific place and time in New York-and American-history.
Dallas Morning News
A winning novel and a lovely tribute to a New Yorker whose only claim to fame is her outsized kindness. Her Mazie is richly imagined and three-dimensional, and in these pages she lives forever.
Los Angeles Times
The hugely talented Jami Attenberg, most recently author of The Middlesteins, has built a novel based on an imagined diary of Mazie Phillips, a Bowery movie-theater proprietress.
New York Magazine
Tender-hearted and loose-living, Mazie is the unlikely guardian angel of New York City's Depression-Era down-and-outs. You'll love this smart, touching novel that brings her world to life.
People
Boisterous and compassionate.
O Magazine
A funny, touching novel.
Vanity Fair
An exuberant portrait of an unforgettable woman and the city she loves.
BBC.com
Impressive.... Attenberg excels at developing Mazie's voice as she grows from an impetuous, witty girl, into a shrewd-yet-selfless character. But the book is largely about the silent tragedies of womanhood, and the different forms love and loneliness can take.... What Saint Mazie is most concerned with: how to be a human being.
Bust Magazine
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.... [A] vivid picture of life during the Depression.
Publishers Weekly
Grand, bigmouthed, bighearted Mazie Phillips spends her days as proprietress of the Venice, an old-line New York City movie theater, and her nights on the town. Then the Depression hits, and she opens the Venice to anyone in need.
Library Journal
Early 20th-century New York and its denizens portrayed through the fictional diary of a nonfictional heroine.... Too much concept and not enough story, but Mazie might win your heart anyway with her tough-talking mensch-iness.
Kirkus Reviews
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