04/06/2015
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 The story unfolds mostly through diary entries, but also snippets from an unpublished autobiography (fictional, like the diary entries) and recollections of those who met or knew of the woman who, according to her New York Times obit, “passed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)
"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
"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
"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 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
"[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 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."—The Guardian
"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
"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
"Attenberg has an impressive ability to capture unique voices and make these characters authentic and distinctive... the 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
"[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] nails Mazie's irresistible combination of sweet and seedy, tough and tender."—Miami Herald
"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
"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
"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
"The Middlesteins author Jami Attenberg has traded writing about the Midwest for Jazz Age New York-and, oh, what a glorious swap it is. If you love historical stories with bold language that vividly paint a picture of another era, you'll be so happy to spend your summer days alongside Mazie Phillips, the real-life proprietress of a downtown NYC movie theater called The Venice. Take a peek inside Mazie's diary, and get swept away."—Bustle, "The 17 Best Books of Summer"
"Entertaining . . . A fascinating portrait of early 20th-century New York and of an unlikely champion of the dispossessed."—BookPage
"This follow-up to Attenberg's beloved novel The Middlesteins shares many of that book's hallmarks: unflinching examinations of some of people's more unflattering qualities, compassion for the same, and a clear love and respect for the journeys we all must go on . . . her work has the same sense of bonhomie and joy as did the original 'Saint' Mazie."
—The L Magazine, #1 on the "50 Books You'll Want to Read This Spring and Summer" list
"I loved it to pieces . . . Through an incredible cast of voices, Attenberg gives us the story of Mazie Phillips, the bawdy, brassy broad who runs a New York theater from the Jazz Age through Prohibition and into the Great Depression. Mazie never marries but has admirers aplenty, and she grows from party girl into community fixture as she devotes her time to caring for the homeless and hungry. The frame and structure Attenberg gives her story are as interesting as the story itself, and the whole experience is a delight. Highly recommended!"—Rebecca Joines Schinsky, Book Riot
"SAINT MAZIE is a love letter to a New York City that doesn't exist anymore-the gritty, working-class Lower East Side and Coney Island that your grandparents might remember...genuine and relatable."—Condé Nast Traveler
"A raw, boisterous, generous novel with a heroine to match and New York in its soul, Saint Mazie offers proof again that Jami Attenberg is a brilliant, lion-hearted storyteller."—Maggie Shipstead, author of Astonish Me and Seating Arrangements
"With SAINT MAZIE, Jami Attenberg has crafted a tale that is somehow both a love song and a gut punch at once, and will leave you all the better for having read it. When I finished reading, I wanted to start all over again."—Therese Anne Fowler, author of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald
"Jami Attenberg is a master at creating complex and compelling characters. She did it with Edie Middlestein of The Middlesteins, and she's done it again with Mazie Phillips-Gordon of SAINT MAZIE. While Mazie is an actual historical figure, in Attenberg's adept hands, she blossoms as a multidimensional woman who helped the down-and-out in New York City during and after the Depression, while stirring up her own mischief and bad behavior. A wonderful and thoughtful read, as relevant then as it is today, SAINT MAZIE is not to be missed."—B.A. Shapiro, New York Times bestselling author of The Art Forger
"SAINT MAZIE is a novel with as much style and moxie as its titular character. I missed Mazie Gordon-Phillips and her family when I was finished reading, but I missed New York, too. By telling this one woman's story, Jami Attenberg has managed to write an ode to New Yorkers of every generation. She is a true poet of the city."—Gabrielle Zevin, author of The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry
"I'd love to be Jami Attenberg for a day to see what she sees. The next best thing is to read the touching, funny, and wise SAINT MAZIE, which is as difficult to categorize as the hard-living, heart-breaking, soul-saving ticket taker it is about."—Charlotte Rogan, author of The Lifeboat
"SAINT MAZIE moves with joy and wonder through the past. This book has such brio, warmth, intelligence and personality it seems a wonder it is made of mere words."—Rebecca Lee, author of Bobcat & Other Stories
01/01/2015
Author of the New York Times best-selling The Middlesteins, Attenberg returns with a new work unexpectedly set during Prohibition and inspired by a real-life figure in Joseph Mitchell's indelible Up in the Old Hotel. 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. With a 50,000-copy first printing.
2015-02-17
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.
As always, Tavia Gilbert is a shining light as an audiobook performer. Her voice is as varied as the diverse cast of characters in this unusually structured novel. The Mazie of the title is a scrappy, independent woman; one follows her progress on gritty Depression-era streets through diary entries and other characters' accounts. At times, the transitions between these different narratives seem awkward or stilted. In addition, some details enlighten while others drag down the pacing by elaborating on peripherally important details. Overall, though, the story has its appeal—essentially it’s a family saga that spans a motley cast populating New York City's Lower East Side. Gilbert's energy and alacrity with voices make this a notable listen. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine