Jami Attenberg’s Saint Mazie focuses on Queen of the Bowery

A larger-than-life woman who rescued hobos from the streets of New York during the Depression is perfect novel material.

Jami Attenberg’s novel evocatively captures New York’s Bowery in the Depression era. Picture: Berenice Abbott

‘‘The past,’’ Margaret Atwood once noted, ‘‘is made of paper ... records, documents, newspaper stories, eyewitness reports, gossip and rumour and opinion and contradiction … if you’re after the truth, the whole and detailed truth, and nothing but the truth, you’re going to have a thin time of it if you trust paper; but, with the past, it’s almost all you’ve got.’’

In researching Saint Mazie, the much anticipated follow-up to her acclaimed 2012 bestseller The Middlesteins, American writer Jami Attenberg didn’t even have that.

Like many folk heroes, such as Sydney’s Shakespeare-quoting, taxi-dodging Bee Miles, much of what was known of “Queen of the Bowery” Mazie Phillips Gordon was forgotten when those who had encountered her in all her fur-wearing, diamond-dripping, wisecracking glory during the Depression themselves died.

But unlike “Queen Bee”, whose antics were enthusiastically reported, the only documentary evidence of the woman dubbed “Saint Mazie” by the grateful hobos she rescued from New York’s mean streets for more than 50 years was Joseph Mitchell’s 1940 profile of her in The New Yorker (later published in his bestselling collection Up in the Old Hotel), and a couple of brief reports after her death.

While such meagre information must be frustrating for a historian, it’s fodder for a novelist, especially when they are as inspired by ­Mitchell’s evocative piece as Attenberg acknowledges she was.

In this intensely heartfelt and atmospheric novel, Attenberg exploits this lack of documentation with the conceit of an archivist editing Mazie’s fictionalised diary and extracts from her unpublished memoir, interposed with recorded interviews of other researchers or contemporaries (and, by the end, the archivist’s own story).

Writing over 22 years from the age of 10, and seeing the world from inside a grimy cinema ticket booth and the bottoms of dingy speakeasy shot glasses, “good time gal” Mazie candidly recounts the colour and deprivation of New York’s 1920s slums and her and her family’s joys and heartaches.

She’s a marvellous creation: big-hearted, brave, bawdy, her bluster tempered by vulnerability rooted in a brutal, neglected childhood; as thwarted in her search for love as she is relentless in her quest for a good time.

Like her and her diary, Saint Mazie is deeply compassionate and often engagingly written, replete with rich historical detail, a keen ear for contemporaneous slang, and the same passionate concern for the downtrodden.

Attenberg loves Mazie and her evocatively drawn neighbourhood, although her enthusiasm is both overwhelming and underwhelming. Saint Mazie throngs with its denizens and their stories, although with Mazie, her diary and her larger-than-life personality taking centre stage, many feel like sketchy cameos, even those with whom Mazie apparently has close relationships, such as her eccentrically cinephile manager or the nun who inspires her good works.

Perhaps to compensate, and eager to make us like them, Attenberg doesn’t allow us to get to know anyone on our own terms. We’re constantly reminded how good Mazie is, how unconventional, how feisty, how selfless — not only by Mazie but also by everyone around her.

But, like extracts from her autobiography acting as epigraphs to each chapter, this often overweens into bathos or blitheness without revealing why she cares so much about bums: ‘‘Somebody loved them once, and that’s all you need to know.’’

Such constant telling, rather than showing, extends to the narrative, which constantly pre-empts itself. Interviewees reveal what will happen to characters before they’re even introduced, most notably the way the son of Mazie’s great love, a seaman who calls on her every time he’s in port, discusses the end of their affair before the Captain even appears.

While this ploy could offer great ironic possibilities, their relationship, although sensual, feels as if it’s already happened, drained of any real or revelatory emotion. ‘‘It didn’t feel real to me,’’ Mazie laments as they part. Maddeningly, it’s repeated for another of her affairs later on.

Despite, or because of, so much happening, the novel doesn’t get round to Mazie’s unorthodox mission until the penultimate chapter, years after the main action, making the previous 250-odd pages, for all their sometimes affecting dramas, feel perambulatory, and the conclusion even more perfunctory. ‘‘Only just now,’’ Mazie reflects three years into the Depression, ‘‘I am seeing how much trouble this city of mine is in.’’

It feels as if Attenberg, by this point, suspects the same of the novel. With increasingly frequent caesuras between episodes and seemingly incredible leaps between each, it feels as if she’s scrambling to tie everything up, ultimately anticlimactically — especially when new, marginal characters, such as the archivist, are introduced late; their stories, while intriguing, are distractions to the main action.

As one such character notes: ‘‘[A]nd then she was gone for five years. No diary updates, nothing … five years of using our imagination. Five years of filling in the blanks.’’

Yet if Attenberg had left more out, perhaps there would be more to care about. Rereading Mitchell’s profile (still available in The New Yorker’s archives), you can detect traces of Saint Mazie — and catch glimpses of what it might have been.

It’s as direct and funny as its subject, breathing more life into her and her story in a few memorably pungent pages than this well-intentioned noble failure does in more than 300.

Sunil Badami is a writer and broadcaster.

Saint Mazie

By Jami Attenberg

Serpent’s Tail, 324pp, $32.99