One of the most annoying trends in fiction right now is the novel based on the life of a literary figure. What’s the point of trying to fictionalize Virginia Woolf or Zelda Fitzgerald when they’ve already told their own stories in their own distinct voices? In comparison, a lot of 21st-century literary ventriloquism just seems like a pale imitation.
At times like these, Mazie can come off as pretentious, or maybe just the creation of a novelist, instead of the street-smart New Yorker she’s purported to be. The incongruity can sometimes be jarring enough to pull you out of the story. But mostly Attenberg pulls off the trick of writing about the past with a modern sensibility without making Mazie come off as a time traveler from the future educating the yokels of the past or succumbing to the (considerable) temptation to rattle off as much 1920s slang as possible.
