Nancy Lemann is the author of five novels and one work of nonfiction, the glorious and strange Ritz of the Bayou (1987). New Orleans features prominently in her work, as do the rituals of upper-class White Southern society, drinking, and affection for the principled derelict. Her first novel Lives of the Saints, from 1985, has become a cult classic, beloved for its cracked romanticism, its giddy melancholy, its louche New Orleans grandeur. That NYRB Classics has chosen to reissue Lives of the Saints, as well as publish Lemann’s new novel The Oyster Diaries, her first in more than twenty years, is cause for much rejoicing.
Gloves off: Lives of the Saints shouldn’t be relegated to the status of a cult classic; it’s an American classic. A magnificent book, sui generis, among the best times you can have in 140-odd pages—this is a book you buy copies of for all your friends and demand they read it immediately. (That’s how I found the book—from a friend raving about it. It is an excellent word-of-mouth book.) To read it is to become an acolyte, an evangelist.
Lives of the Saints begins at a swelteringly hot New Orleans wedding reception. The drunken groom is screaming our narrator Louise Brown’s name from the dance floor. Louise has just returned from college in “the East.” No one is particularly sure why the drunken groom is screaming her name. It is simply that he is “falling apart.” This is a universal condition for the people at the wedding, and for the social world of the characters in general: “Everyone had breakdowns at this wedding. Including the bride and groom. Especially the bride and groom. Crowded parties like at the Stewarts’ often can be known to Bring On Breakdowns.”
The party lasts for more than twenty pages, roughly one-seventh of the book. The bride’s father rants about “the woman question” as his wife looks on horrified, the groom screams and sends plates and cutlery crashing, and a wealthy, handsome man named Mr. Legendre smashes his car into a brick wall. In terms of plot, it accomplishes very little. But with regard to story, it contains an entire world: sultry New Orleans, the customs and manners of the debauched upper crust, and most important, Louise’s wonderstruck love for the shambling, congenial inventor Claude Collier.
Here’s how she describes Claude:
He was wearing a yellow tie, a wrinkled dark blue suit, and an overstarched white shirt. His tie was strewn over his shoulder and around the back as though it were strangling him. He was absentminded, disheveled, not vain. Vanity is worse than any vice, in my opinion. He had none. It was this which made him handsome.
He took my hand in both of his, and looked at me with his benevolence—a look that wished you so profoundly well, it seemed to predict that life was a swift, sure-footed journey.
Louise works in a law office, typing and running errands. She pursues Claude romantically; he always seems just beyond her reach. Louise, Claude, and their rowdy friends go to parties, the racetrack, restaurants and bars. These people delight in language, and their endlessly circular conversations delight in misdirection. As Louise says when describing one of her employer’s drunken tracing of his family’s history back to Louis XIV, “But that only made him more of a nut, which was good. Nuts made life worth living.”
Claude’s dissolution reaches a breaking point after his beloved younger brother, five-year-old Saint Collier, dies by falling from a balcony. Claude boards a train to New York, leaving Louise behind in New Orleans. He road-trips around the North, eventually winding up in Boston, where Louise and his father visit him. Afterwards, Louise languishes for a summer in New Orleans, rejecting suitors. In her despair, Louise accidentally sets a trash can on fire at work, and after she forgets an important signature while filing papers on a case in Virginia, she is fired. Louise spends more and more time grieving with Claude’s father over Saint. Claude has an idea for a cost-cutting alcohol distiller and summons Louise to Cambridge, where he has started a company, and their love, in its own way, blooms. Soon enough, they’re back in New Orleans for a family emergency, a horse-betting scheme, wild amounts of drinking, and whatever consequences may come.
The journey to the North is essential to the book, because it both provides a separation between Louise and Claude and expands the scope of the novel. As Lemann writes, “Millions of Southerners go up North to live and see the world, but how many Yankees do you catch moving down to Alabama, say? Therefore, we Southerners can understand the North because we have seen it, we lived there. But you Yankees would never just move to Alabama for two years. As a result, Southerners are actually the less provincial, contrary to popular thought.” In describing New Orleans to us, she addresses the reader as “you Yankees,” which means she knows who probably makes up most of her audience. Lemann’s narrator is explaining not just the region but the whole country to us, telling us our nature, what the human heart will do when planted in a place like New Orleans, which may allow our deeper eccentricities to blossom.
The plot is very much a sequence of things happening, buttressed by increasingly absurd conversations (a favorite exchange, presented without context: “‘I dare you to taste my lettuce, Henry,’ said Mel. ‘Just taste it. Just let me fix you a salad from my crops.’”). But again, plot isn’t the point. Lives of the Saints is a book about people. Its characters for the most part are White upper-class wrecks, but they are eccentric and charming. It’s neither satire, though it well could function that way, nor a critique, though plenty of criticism is given. Lemann’s characters have serious problems—alcoholism, infidelity, insanity—and yet she writes about them with the kind of affection and good humor that can break your heart.
Take this bit about Claude, deep in his mourning, listening to Bach solo cello suites in his car:
People like Claude do not ordinarily listen to morose cello suites. It is not the kind of music they like. It is not of their element—their sociability and lack of solitude, the indiscriminate warmth in their hearts, which is the meaning of generosity. I asked him why he had those morose cello suites on the tape, and he said it was because his heart broke so many times, into a thousand pieces, and that it was constantly doing this.
“You mean your heart’s constantly breaking into a million pieces on the floor, like usual, right?”
“I just mean my heart is full—so then I watch it fall on the floor and break into a million pieces. But it’s great.”
Despite all the absurdities, she never lets the reader stray from what is most important: the heart, the way it loves, dissembles, breaks. And, faced with tragedy, simply carries on in its loving.
The Oyster Diaries, Lemann’s first novel since 2002’s Malaise, is another beast altogether. It’s a strange hybrid, disparate parts connected by Lemann’s lightning prose, her stylistic tics, that wonderful mind at work. The novel begins in the form of diary, the second entry (no date on the first) dated February 8, 2022. A woman named Delery is “plagued by remorse, but [her] remorse seemed inspired by insignificant dumb things.” She watches a Royal Opera House production of Rigoletto streamed at a neighborhood movie theater in Washington, DC. She is “ecstatic—to be moved by something, to feel, to think, and to remember.” Some crisis has taken place in Delery’s life, one she does not want to grant significance to, though it clearly has left her shattered.
Throughout the next several entries, Delery reads Kierkegaard and recalls seeing Don Giovanni in two separate performances, 20 years apart, the first in DC and the second on her “device” in New Orleans. Her thoughts alternate between the two cities, but it’s clear Delery’s heart is in New Orleans. She has a love-hate relationship with New York. She has two leftist millennial daughters, one of whom criticizes Delery’s “Stockholm syndrome for the patriarchy.” She has a volunteer job “monitoring justice in New Orleans criminal courts.” She thinks about her parents. She has to have emergency dental surgery. We wonder where all this is going.
It is also, improbably, thrilling. The writing is gorgeous: clean, beautiful sentences, often hilarious, with Lemann’s signature repetitions. Throughout the book she is riffing, and she’s a world-class riffer. On Delery’s dentist: “My dentist and I have a unique relationship. A sadomasochistic relationship, maybe. She has an interesting attitude to dentistry. Other dentists have fancy staffs and high-tech equipment. My dentist is more like Ernest Shackleton. Modern innovation in dentistry is not her focus but she gets the job done.” On Kierkegaard: “So far Kierkegaard was everything I adore: he’s in a bad mood, everything annoys him, and he is not afraid to repeat himself.” On New Orleans court judges: “Black women are by far the best judges. Because they’ve had it up to here and they don’t have time for falderal.” On virtue: “It’s boring to be a saint. Goodness is dazzling when you come across it in others. But not in yourself, since virtue is its own reward so it’s boring.”
After the final dated entry, July 7, 2022, in a section called “Intermission,” we get a meditation on Delery’s psychologist “Yankee” mother, who moved to New Orleans, married Delery’s father, and kept a diary about the dinner parties she held: “Everything about my mother seemed at odds with her fierce dedication to mastering these rituals. But she dutifully filled out all the categories—the details diagrammed like strategic battle plans—concluding with General Remarks, where she would summarize the outcome: ‘Food extraordinarily good. Conversation extraordinarily excruciating.’”
The next section leaps ahead to the death of Delery’s mother and her father’s swift marriage to Del’s close friend, Amelia, 27 years his junior. Delery is clearly wrecked by this, but she takes it with a kind of stoic unmiserable acceptance, as she seems to take most things, though it takes a good 10 years for her resentment to fully die. This 10 years passes in a paragraph. We learn of her mother’s moment of infidelity to her father while on stay at a psychiatric home for nervous exhaustion, how her father never got over it:
He never forgave her. He said he didn’t. But they lived together for the next forty years until he took her through the door to heaven.
“I don’t think you could have done that if you didn’t love her,” I said.
“My father helped me,” he said. “He knew my story. He gave me his advice.”
“What did he say?”
“This is a test of your character.”
An enigmatic comment.
Then the diary form disappears, and something of a narrative begins to develop. Slowly we come to learn that Delery’s own husband, Jack, has committed an “indiscretion” with their former houseguest, Delery’s friend Ivy. Delery is devastated. She sees herself as a fool; but as always, her attitude is a chin-up forbearing. This is one of the major themes of the book, best illustrated early when recounting an anecdote about the Duke of Wellington, one of the many recurring characters in Delery’s thoughts:
During the battle of Waterloo one of Wellington’s generals looked down and said in surprise to the Duke, “By God, I’ve lost my leg.” Wellington looked at it and confirmed crisply, “By God, so you have.” And then they went on with the battle. Talk about an iron nerve. By George, some things are difficult. Let’s get on with it.
As Delery tries to figure out what to do with her husband’s affair, we learn of her life over the past twenty years: the death of her father and her father-in-law. Disastrous family vacations to the coast of South Carolina. Walker Percy makes an appearance. Claude Collier and Louise Brown drift in and out of the narrative, connecting this novel with Lives of the Saints. Delery remembers her own long-ago relationship with Claude, one that still lingers with her, especially in light of her own husband’s betrayal. Delery says,
One does not often feel such love. It has to do with New Orleans of course. But there is more to it. Something to do with my longheld love for my dear friend, his forbearing wife Louise. Not that Miss Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius over here would ever do anything untoward. But that there is some sort of tortured quality to my love for him. It’s hard to put my finger on it. . . . I worried about him from time to time, probably in visions in the night when God speaks.
The Claude sections are particularly heartbreaking, as time and life happening to people you love always is.
The diary form reemerges in the last 25 pages recounting a family safari to Africa, her cheating husband’s life dream, much to the chagrin of her leftist daughters. This section is lightly adapted from Lemann’s piece about her real-life family’s African safari published last year in Harper’s. Though it does provide a kind of ending for the book—the family has stayed whole, though in a wounded and changed form; everyone is getting on with it—the final section feels like a bit of a letdown, especially after such rich writing on love, marriage, heartbreak, and poor Claude. Lemann is as sharp and funny as ever in these sections, and her sympathy for and insight into the male lions is so wonderful, and it does feel all of a piece, but the reader is left wondering if there was a better way out of the book.
It’s also hard to complain. I didn’t come to this book for narrative cohesion; I came to experience Nancy Lemann’s mind. The greatest pleasure of reading a novel has always been the ability to dwell for an extended time in the consciousness of another person. The Oyster Diaries gives me that in spades. And after twenty-four years, it’s a joy to be in that company again.
Jimmy Cajoleas was born in Jackson, Mississippi. He lives in New York.
