THE OYSTER DIARIES, by Nancy Lemann
The list of heavyweights who’ve written well about New Orleans is long. It includes Walt Whitman, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Michael Ondaatje and Cormac McCarthy. Yet the city has punched below its weight, historically, in terms of its purely local fiction-writing colossuses.
John Kennedy Toole, the author of “A Confederacy of Dunces,” grew up there. Walker Percy, though he lived primarily in Covington, La., knew the city intimately and set “The Moviegoer” largely in New Orleans. Anne Rice’s vampire novels, whether they’re to your taste or not, still cast long twilight shadows amid the Garden District’s moss-draped live oaks and wrought iron.
New Orleans has long had nearly as many major nonfiction writers as varieties of po’ boy, but it’s perplexing: Why has this laid-back yet buoyant, rickety yet opulent and totally crackpot city (it’s hard to believe it exists in America) not nurtured more top-flight novelists?
I’ve heard two semi-plausible explanations. One is that New Orleans is all about evanescent, consumable-on-the-spot pleasures: second-line parades, live jazz, dancing, crawfish, sex, dive bars, gardens and endless rounds of Ramos Gin Fizzes and Sazeracs. “You had to be there” might be the unofficial city motto.
The second explanation comes from Richard Ford, who simply found it hard to get any work done there, what with all the hubbub and the puking sounds coming from the direction of Bourbon Street. “New Orleans is noisy and crowded, and not a good place to be a novelist,” he told The Guardian in 2003 — yet they continue to thrive in noisy, chaotic New York City.
One of the joys of committing this review to pixels is welcoming the arrival of a new writer into the pantheon of New Orleans’s native-born novelists, one who should have been there all along. (She already was in some corners.) That writer is Nancy Lemann (pronounced “lemon”), who has three books out this spring.
One is a new novel. It’s titled “The Oyster Diaries,” and we’ll get to it. The second is a new edition of Lemann’s first novel, “Lives of the Saints,” first published in 1985 and long out of print. It’s funny but also has the condensed quality of a dream. It imparts a lingering sadness, one that follows you around for a few days after you’ve read it.
The third is “The Ritz of the Bayou,” originally published in 1987. It’s a nonfiction account of the Louisiana governor Edwin Edward’s trials for bribery, fraud and racketeering that played out in 1985. The book began as a Vanity Fair assignment, and you can see why Tina Brown, then the magazine’s go-go editor, killed it like a bug.
It’s so personal and moody and filled with roller-coaster inversions that Lemann, hilariously, barely managed to tweezer in the details of the case. It’s a humid, meandering, late-period miniature masterpiece of the New Journalism. James Wolcott’s introduction to the new edition is a model of the form.
Each of these books is excellent, and exists on the same continuum. The narrators are Lemann or versions of her. These women are frank, sardonic, bookish, self-absorbed and neurotic; they stew in their own juices. They deliver jokey shoves that sometimes land like real ones. The author channels their discontent and delivers slashing little thunderstorms of meaning.
These are books for the misanthropes, the anti-socialites, those with negative self-regard. (You know who you are.) They’ll put you in mind of writers such as Lorrie Moore, Lydia Davis, Mary Robison and Fran Lebowitz, the four horsewomen of the anarchapocalypse. Women who take no bull hockey from anyone.
We’re not used to seeing this sort of voice set free in New Orleans, and that fact is part of Lemann’s considerable charms. My advice is to take these three books in the order they were written. (Lemann’s other novels are “Sportsman’s Paradise,” “Malaise” and “The Fiery Pantheon.” I’ve not yet read them; some are hard to find; I’m only human.) “Lives of the Saints” is the best of those under consideration here.
Lehmann grew up in the Garden District, in the faux-casual nosebleed strata of New Orleans society, and most of her books are set there. Her characters, who’ve gone off up north and who feel like misfits and failures, are often returning home for fraught visits. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, they can come back — but they can’t come back all the way.
“The Oyster Diaries” is about a woman named Delery Anhalt, who’s from an old New Orleans family. Her father is an eminent lawyer who knows all of Homer in ancient Greek. The book takes its title from the fact that he’s long kept a diary in which he grades every oyster he’s eaten (“Sept. 21 — utterly tasteless,” “Sept. 22 — beautiful to look at but no salt,” “Sept. 28 — very fine.”) Lemann has proposed more than once that you should never, ever say that you’re going out to eat oysters. Instead, say this: You are going out to grade oysters.
Delery and her husband, who have adult children, live in the D.C. area. Their marriage is falling apart. Covid has settled in and, to keep a toe dipped in the currents of New Orleans, she volunteers to be a virtual court monitor of criminal cases there. The novel recounts the travails of having houseguests and taking beach vacations with extended family; it also includes a (puzzling) account of an African safari.
But the book finds its center of gravity in the Big Easy, amid the white summer suits, the seersucker and the mopped brows. Delery returns home because her elders are aging out. She arrives and immediately feels like an outsider. In an aria that’s typical of this novel, she thinks:
I imagined that my mother and her social milieu felt disgust at my failure to measure up to their standards of suavity and comportment. I had once been like them: well-dressed, vivacious, popular. Now I was on a whole different plane of reality, characterized by self-loathing, pain, doubt and angst. The whole edifice had begun to crumble.
In Lemann’s books, as in Joan Didion’s, the whole edifice is always beginning to crumble.
Delery ruminates on her wastrel youth. This novel includes a welcome appearance by an old flame named Claude Collier, a well-mannered blue-eyed boy with “sublime hell in his soul.” Claude has figured in some of Lemann’s earlier novels. His scenes remind you what a fine observer of men Lemann is. He appears to resemble a young Walker Evans and was once the missing link, somehow, between everything that had happened to Delery and everything that might happen.
“The Oyster Diaries” works, on a surface level, because Lemann is full of shrewd observations about things like bumpy, storm-tossed landings at Louis Armstrong Airport, the naming of hurricanes and why Black women make the best judges (“because they’ve had it up to here and they don’t have time for falderal”).
She drops little anti-Zen aphorisms as she streams along: “There’s a fine line between courtesy and hypocrisy”; “The garden of wrath. It needs to be mowed.” She delivers rational descriptions of irrationality.
Below and beyond this surface chop, “The Oyster Diaries” is remorseful and melancholy, and it leaves a wide wake. It’s also a bit scattered and hectic, not Lemann’s best. Yet it’s wide awake. It’s an epic of disgruntlement that’s in touch with life’s little moments of grace. It reminds you that Lemann isn’t just a shining New Orleans writer. She’s a shining American one.
THE OYSTER DIARIES | By Nancy Lemann | New York Review Books | 227 pp. | Paperback, $17.95
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
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