Too much concept and not enough story, but Mazie might win your heart anyway with her tough-talking mensch-iness.
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.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-9989-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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