Saint Mazie

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"Attenberg brings [Mazie] to life primarily through her fictional diaries...she also weaves in sections from her unpublished autobiography and fictitious oral history accounts from people who knew her," I expected Saint Mazie to be a bit like Lovers at the Chameleon Club.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.