‘This City Will Always Pursue You’
A love-it-or-leave-it feature of Nancy Lemann’s distinctive, dreamy style is that she often repeats herself. Images, events, and turns of phrase reoccur both within and across her five novels and even, to a lesser extent, in her nonfiction. The people in her books are always “falling apart”; their hearts are often “in a million pieces on the floor.” Her narrators—usually women from New Orleans—have a reverence for older traditions, including baseball, which represents “a chance to go forth with the heroes,” and for men in seersucker suits who have outdated affectations, like reading ancient Greek and eating oysters at lunch. Several of these women have soft spots for the same “blue-eyed boy with the crooked smile” (who has a drinking problem), and they tend to indulge in what could be called negative self-talk (they chide themselves for being “idiotic” or “lamebrained”).
In the introduction to a new reissue of Lemann’s 1985 cult-classic debut novel, Lives of the Saints, the British writer Geoff Dyer makes note of the “hypnotic repetition” that gives the book its rhythm and, crucially, its sense of place; he points to its frequent depiction of rain that slashes and nights that swelter. The repetition is also what, over time, has given Lemann’s work its poignancy, so it’s fitting that New York Review Books, which published the reissue, has simultaneously released Lemann’s first new novel in 24 years. The Oyster Diaries returns readers to New Orleans and revisits some of the stories from Saints, and it is partly about the humiliating experience of not seeing what’s right in front of us, or not understanding it, and having to look again and again. It has an air of running the tape back once more—this time, with the perspective gained by the passage of time and contact with a new generation.
The middle-aged narrator, Delery Anhalt, who bears many slant resemblances to Lemann, bounces between Washington, D.C., and New Orleans, and promises at the outset to recount “a bonanza of heartache that ultimately calibrated my soul with insight my soul had been waiting for its whole life.” This is a much more direct statement of purpose than Lemann’s previous narrators have given. The new novel also has a more concrete plot, though calling it plot driven would be going too far. And it exists more firmly not only in its place but in its time, which is roughly right now.
When I spoke with Lemann in March, she had just returned from Argentina; she apologized for having “Argentine COVID,” which she worried was clouding her thoughts. Finding herself back in print, she seemed both grateful and a little disoriented, and she referred to the years that passed between the publication of her 2002 novel, Malaise, and these NYRB books—plus another publisher’s reissue of her 1987 nonfiction book, The Ritz of the Bayou—as “the Doom.” She regarded the process that brought the Doom to an end as somewhat magical. In fact, it was largely the doing of a publicist, Kaitlin Phillips, who started recreationally championing Lemann’s work several years ago. Phillips connected Lemann with an editor at The Paris Review and one at Harper’s, both of whom published new work of hers (which helped her get a new agent).
Lemann was born in New Orleans, and lived there until she attended college at Brown. “Before I left New Orleans, I just thought, Okay, this is what it’s like. This is what life is like,” she said. “But the minute I left and went up north I just realized, Oh my God, I have this ace in my back pocket.” The city was so singular and strange, its style so well preserved by its “isolation and remoteness,” that she could write about it endlessly. Lemann was 28 when she published Lives of the Saints, the story of an eccentric New Orleans family and a young woman experiencing her “wastrel youth.” Now she is 70. One of The Oyster Diaries’ two epigraphs is from the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy: “You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. This city will always pursue you.”
[Read: Twenty years after the storm]
Even when Lemann is not writing about New Orleans, she’s writing about how wherever she is resembles or doesn’t resemble New Orleans. New York’s “suave crumbling gleam” reminds her of New Orleans; Washington, D.C., where “everyone acts like federal tax bureaucrats, just by osmosis,” does not seem to remind her of New Orleans. In Malaise, the only Lemann novel narrated by someone not from New Orleans, the lead character—who is from Alabama—nonetheless compares Los Angeles’s Sunset Boulevard to New Orleans’s French Quarter, finding them both “darkly beguiling.” “People say I think everything reminds me of New Orleans, and it is true,” Lemann told me.
Across her work, the city has been embodied by a recurring character named Claude Collier, who was the love interest in Lives of the Saints. A modern reader might be tempted to roll their eyes at him; ungenerously, he is a failson. An alcoholic, he eventually drives his father’s law firm into the ground. He would fly through a casting call for the Bravo show Southern Charm. But Louise, Saints’ narrator, finds him angelic despite his vices, and continually points out that he is kind, wise, polite, tender, and lovely. (“He had the sweetness of the town itself and broke my heart completely into a million pieces on the floor,” she says.) Revisiting the novel now, Lemann found it a bit ridiculous that Louise was “constantly rhapsodizing” about this guy. “I can’t even get through that book when I try to reread it,” she said.
And yet she is clearly still fond of the rogue. She has continued to bring him back in her novels, even after saying in a 1988 interview that she would not. Claude was an out-of-frame instigator of the drama in her 1992 novel, Sportsman’s Paradise, and we learn the end of his story in The Oyster Diaries, after he reappears in the last third of the book (on a motorcycle). This time, he’s different, or he’s shown to us differently. Claude is still kind, wise, polite, tender, and lovely, but he’s now a middle-aged man whose life has caught up to him. “The new narrator admires him the way Louise did, but she’s not all sappy about it all the time,” Lemann said. “And she doesn’t have the stars in her eyes, you know?”
Though The Oyster Diaries finds space to close the loop on Claude Collier, it spends more time with August Anhalt, the narrator’s father and the keeper of the namesake oyster diaries. These are notations about the oysters he eats most days—“awful,” “still awful,” “terrible,” “no good,” “wonderful,” “exceptional,” or “beautiful to look at but no salt.” The plot takes off when the great tragedy of August’s life—a spousal betrayal—reoccurs by befalling his daughter. Unlike Lemann’s best-known heroine, Delery does not find everyone amazing; she finds most people annoying and moronic instead. But not her father: He is “rickety but suave—like New Orleans.”
Lemann knows that her debut novel, a romantic portrait of the deep South in the late ’70s and early ’80s, may now read as old-fashioned in certain ways. Lives of the Saints barely remarks, for instance, on the Black house staff who attend to the central characters. Lemann remembered a New York “beau” telling her to take these figures out, but she couldn’t do it without making the story unrealistic. Yet in The Oyster Diaries, Lemann widens reality’s lens a little. She directly describes the residential segregation of her beloved city. Her narrator, in the course of volunteer work as a court observer, records racial disparities she notices in the legal process; she also owns up to her own lifelong reluctance to look at such things directly, referring a couple of times to “the naked bulb” being too harsh.
[Read: ‘Intensely southern and only faintly Jewish’]
The Oyster Diaries isn’t a midlife-crisis novel, Lemann told me. It’s about the differences between youth and age—about death, on the one hand, and disillusionment, on the other. It’s about, as she put it, “having the veil rent from the temple, having the stars dashed from your eyes.” These revelations are coming pretty late in Delery’s life, Lemann admitted. “What world was she living in? Some childlike world.” Now her father is dying, her husband deceives her, and she lives in D.C. during an intense political era. Time to wake up.
Lemann has written about President Trump (“the world’s most obnoxious person”) before, and in this book he is something like an ominous general presence—a “Rasputin-like menace,” as she put it to me. Before Trump, she thought that politics were mostly boring, and that they were supposed to be. Now she works the voices of her adult daughters into her writing, often demonstrating the distance between the generations—a generation that could call politics “boring” without being reprimanded about privilege, versus one that can’t.
I found these moments of intergenerational friction to be some of the funniest of the new book. Lemann respects her daughters (one of whom, Emmeline Clein, is also a writer), but she also teases them. She sketches some great scenes in which the younger generation’s sincere sense of moral responsibility and obvious correctness on the facts clashes with the older generation’s often-overlooked strong suits. The latter include a creatively productive ambivalence, an ingrained reluctance to make other people feel stupid, and the ability to just talk about something else at dinner. “They try to teach me and I learn and I accept their teachings,” she said of her daughters. “But I also like to satirize their teachings sometimes.”
She satirizes herself, too. A late stretch of The Oyster Diaries is set on a family trip to several countries in Africa, and begins with Delery noting, “I always knew Africa would remind me of New Orleans.” New Orleans again?, you have to ask. But that seems to be the joke. “My daughters would say I should explore, study, and unlearn certain aspects of these sentiments,” the narrator adds fondly. Maybe she will; maybe she won’t. Maybe Lemann will write another odd, wonderful novel, and we’ll find out.