Review: Abby Rosebrock on Nancy Lemann
Deceptively comedic work that smuggles within it challenging revelations
Nancy Lemann, born in New Orleans in 1956, published her first novel in 1985 to satisfying acclaim. Although she never stopped writing, there followed a decades-long period of obscurity she calls “the doom.” This month, over forty years later, her new novel, The Oyster Diaries, is being published alongside new editions of two major works: her debut, Lives of the Saints, now offered with a densely insightful, must-read introduction by the British author Geoff Dyer, and a 1987 nonfiction tour de force called The Ritz of The Bayou, introduced with equal astuteness by American journalist James Wolcott. Readers seem to be joining Dyer and Wolcott in celebrating Lemann as a too-long-neglected, essential writer. Her work is deceptively comedic, diaristic, and sometimes picaresque—smuggled within it are challenging revelations.
In Lives of the Saints, a young woman returns South after college in the Northeast and falls in love with an alcoholic, whom she calls “the most sterling character I have ever known.” Lauded for its auric descriptions of New Orleans, the book is also a penetrating study of Southern womanhood—specifically the self-destructive yen for romance and annihilation that can resist not only a formidable native intelligence but a worldly and progressive reeducation. Lemann’s opening description of a “tragic” wedding where “everyone had breakdowns,” with old patriarchs milling around, casually pronouncing on the fragility of women (“young girls should be sheltered. One affair, and they’re ruined”), was so resonant with my experience of Southern misogyny and ambient psychological turmoil that it would have been unbearable to read had it not been so laugh-out-loud funny, and gorgeously drawn.
