IT'S NO PUZZLE

Novelist and memoirist Mazza examines an archive of family photos to reconstruct the lives of kinfolk, real and surmised.

It turns out, with respect to the title, that it is a puzzle: You never know what mysteries lie behind a seemingly innocent image. Mazza’s family was photo-happy, and she had the task, after her mother died, of scanning “her many thousands of color slides beginning in 1950, taken before she went back to snapshots in 1982, and to digital in 2005.” The work helped her to wrestle with grief over the deaths of her mother and a beloved dog but also to shelter herself in 2018 from “the looming end of democracy, apparently as hopelessly chaotic as the collapse of my beloved dog’s body.” The author unearths numerous thought-provoking questions: What to make of her father’s Leica-snapped photos in occupied Germany at the end of World War II? Why did only seven slides survive from a storied family trip to Maine? To the latter, Mazza ventures an entirely sensible answer: “Sometimes 35mm film didn’t engage in the camera’s sprockets when loaded, so it wouldn’t advance when wound after each shot.” The author makes fruitful pop-culture connections between the events of her life and whatever was happening on TV. If she didn’t necessarily wish that “my camp-counselor, swimming-coach, girl-scout-leader Mom was more like June Cleaver,” she finds plenty of semiotic meaning in the adventures of the Beaver and his cohort. Mazza also delivers a few shocks—e.g., finding a photo of her mother in blackface. She shows how the racism of yore survived in her own time (“for all the long-haired blue-jeaned activists of all races and genders, there were enough tie-and-blazer white boys born into a prep-school privilege that maintained their version of meritocracy”), underscoring the idea that life is complex and messy.

Photographic archaeology turns up long-hidden secrets and interesting meditations on the unexplored corners of life.