From thecut.com
By Cat Zhang
Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Book Covers: The New York Review of Books
In 1986, Vanity Fair sent a rascally New Orleans novelist to cover the corruption trial of the then-governor of Louisiana, Edwin Edwards. Perhaps a mistake: Thirty-year-old Nancy Lemann apparently couldn’t be bothered to note the basic facts of the case, less a courtroom reporter than a hometown caricaturist. She depicted New Orleans as a carnival of eccentrics — jazz-bar creeps, born-again Christians, lunatic politicians. In Louisiana, “people have a high tolerance for ‘human frailty,’ if not a special fondness for it,” she wrote, explaining how such a flamboyant, indiscreet governor got away with so much. (Acquitted at the time, Edwards would eventually serve ten years in federal prison for racketeering.) Her freewheeling draft infuriated Tina Brown, who never ran it; it was revised and eventually published as the 1987 book The Ritz of the Bayou.
Forty years later, Lemann’s transgressions — her rambling theatrics, blatant disregard for exposition, propensity to deem everything “insane” — have been forgiven. At 70, she is the author of a new novel, The Oyster Diaries, her first in 24 years, and the subject of a delayed renaissance. The Ritz of the Bayou is getting reissued alongside her 1985 cult novel, Lives of the Saints. The latter follows a recent college graduate named Louise Brown who moves from New England back to New Orleans. There she finds her peers — high-society “wastrel youths” — strewn about like weeds in a torn-up garden. Gorgeous and rhapsodic, the novel chronicles the decadent beauty of the South’s palmetto groves and antebellum mansions. It’s like a more humid Great Gatsby with the same piercing anthropological insights and doomed characters.
In The Oyster Diaries, the wastrel youth have grown up. The protagonist, Delery Anhalt, was once a heedless bohemian who went boating in hurricanes and got struck by lightning; now she’s a middle-aged woman languishing in Washington, D.C. She has a husband, Jack, and two daughters, Adelaide and Grace. Composed of short, informal entries, the book is Delery’s “diary of remorse.” She enumerates her perceived personal weaknesses — “self-absorption,” “inability to be decorous/gracious/kind,” “overall impotence,” etc. — hoping that by addressing them she can rescue herself from spiritual malaise. “I have no thoughts, no personality, nothing,” she laments.
Delery goes to the opera and Zooms into murder cases in New Orleans as a volunteer court watcher, but she’s occupied by more mundane melodramas: irritating in-laws, ailing parents, her own self-loathing. Caught between generations, she lacks the galvanizing moral conviction of Adelaide, a millennial social-justice warrior, or the dutiful pragmatism of her genteel parents. Delery is also haunted by her younger self, a girl whose journal entries she finds “shockingly unpleasant and ridiculous and unworthy.” But she misses her adolescent enchantment. In one chapter, she recalls sitting in an ancient courtyard in Italy where she hears someone playing Bach’s “Italian Concerto” on piano. “I burst into tears, and thanked god for reminding me of who I am — a person transfixed by beauty.”
The book’s title refers to a list her father kept during purportedly the hardest year of his life — a graded log of all the oysters he ate at a restaurant across the street from his office. A lawyer with a “Germanic steel trap” mind, he stayed with Delery’s mother for 40 years after she cheated on him, though he apparently never forgave her. Unbound from chronology, The Oyster Diaries slips forward and back in time. On one page, Delery is in her mid-40s; the next, she’s reminiscing about a former student who’s now 55. The narrative threads can be hard to grasp. As is typical of Lemann, there’s not much by way of setup.
Perhaps the book’s slipperiness has to do with the discombobulating effects of time, the past always crashing up against the present, as well as the absurdity of life’s wild juxtapositions. Lemann has a talent for bathos, as seen in many comic exchanges between Delery and her daughter: “ ‘I have a nameless melancholy,’ said Adelaide. ‘Is it because of your grandfather so weak in the hospital?’ I asked. ‘Well no, I think it’s because this guy I liked ghosted me.’ ”
Or perhaps the style emerges from a kind of laziness. The Oyster Diaries is cobbled together from existing material, including a 2022 Paris Review story, “Diary of Remorse,” and a 2023 first-person Harper’s essay, “Lions and Daughters,” about a real-life African safari. (“Emmeline,” a.k.a. Lemann’s writer daughter, Emmeline Clein, becomes Adelaide in the book.) Lemann remarks that Africa reminds her of New Orleans, “whether of civilization/humanity, or in the exact resemblance to the overwhelming black population of my childhood and youth there, not sure.” She adds, “My daughters would say I should explore, study, and unlearn certain aspects of these sentiments.” (I’m inclined to agree.) Lemann makes no attempt to hide how much is borrowed. “I just don’t have enough imagination to get in someone’s head,” she said matter-of-factly on the Harper’s podcast. Details are repurposed from past books; the oyster review, for example, first appears in Ritz of the Bayou.
This could be forgivable if The Oyster Diaries led us somewhere new. But Delery never fully lets go in her diary, hiding behind a defensive inanity that one suspects is partially Lemann’s own. The book loses its predecessors’ fundamental conviction. “I could only love one person. This was my innate principle,” Louise says of her love interest, Claude Collier, a reckless philanderer and Lives of the Saints’s tragic hero. He returns in The Oyster Diaries, as flawed and irresistible as ever. It’s then that the book sheds its listlessness. “When I am nervous and mired in angst and malaise, I still say his name,” Delery lovingly confesses. We see a woman restored to faith, transfixed by beauty again.
https://www.thecut.com/article/review-the-oyster-diaries-nancy-lemann-lives-of-the-saints.html
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