Nancy Lemann’s Wasted Youths

Youth may be wasted on the young, but what if the young are already wasted? The writer Nancy Lemann coined the term “wastrel-youth contingent” to describe characters who squander their early adulthood and pickle themselves in gin. A writer of heady and humid prose, Lemann is an observer of character, an idle reflector, a melancholic meditator. The drift and sway of her fiction feels tipsy—warm and languid, flushed with booze and the muggy mood of the tropics.Her debut novel, Lives of the Saints (1985), is her best-known work, now reissued by New York Review Books. Her book-length courtroom reportage, The Ritz of the Bayou (1987), has been reissued by Hub City Press. Lemann’s unofficial title for The Ritz of the Bayou, a perfect companion to Lives of the Saints, is “Lives of the Sinners.” And a new novel, The Oyster Diaries, caps off the renaissance. Also published by NYRB, it has a charmingly discursive, drawer-emptying quality, a novel stitched together from journal entries, stray vignettes, and perhaps the once-discarded heels of other projects.Lives of the SaintsNYRB Classics, 208 pp., $16.95Lemann’s career revival arrives during a boom of rediscovery, a golden age for reclaiming a lost author. Reissued work is sometimes overpraised, out of an urge to embrace a great artist who went out on the tide of obscurity. And so it’s exciting and alarming to discover how worthy Lemann’s work is of reclamation: her crackling humor, her sharp and soulful observations of character. Her fiction, thin on plot and thick on atmosphere, defies many tired rules of novel writing, just as Ritz defies the rules of journalism. Tina Brown, who originally commissioned it to run in Vanity Fair, found it unpublishable due to Lemann’s total disregard for the details of the case. Lemann was in pursuit of something greater than telling a story or holding attention.Her career has been refreshingly unproductive. She writes the only way she knows how: comic, intuitive, frustrating, discursive, self-doubting. Her novels are light on plot because she views life as unplotted. She writes toward her idiosyncrasies—with repetitions, streaks of reverie, and narrative self-effacement—and her novels model and reward a form of attention akin to worship. These tendencies have crystallized into the style of a great artist, one of the most charming American prose writers alive today.The Oyster Diariesby Nancy LemannNew York Review Books, 240 pp., $17.95The Ritz of the Bayouby Nancy LemannHub City Press, 184 pp., $24.00Lemann was born in New Orleans in 1956. She grew up across the street from the writer Walker Percy, who became her literary mentor and hero. Much like Louise Brown, the narrator of Lives of the Saints, Lemann attended Brown University before returning to New Orleans, where she got a job at a law firm, lived a vibrant social life, and forced herself to write a novel. Freshly returned to the city of her birth, and seeing it with a new love and longing, Lemann wrote Saints in three months, filling it to the brim with a nostalgia for youth even as her youth was still unfolding.Invoked more as a term of endearment than of caution, the “wastrel-youth contingent” of the novel is best represented by Claude Collier, an improbably dashing alcoholic. Claude is a clever inventor—his shrimp-peeling machine is a hit—a blue-eyed Catholic, and, sitting squarely in the crosshairs of Louise’s longing gaze, the novel’s leading man. There’s the will-they-won’t-they question of romance, as well as another will-they-won’t-they: Will Louise succeed or fail in saving Claude from himself? “I’m falling apart,” says Claude. “She’s falling apart,” he says, pointing at Louise. “Everyone is falling apart,” he concludes. Saints is a haunted book, its young people settling prematurely into the neuroses and shortcomings that will stunt their chances at happiness.Claude’s family is an eccentric collection of members of the New Orleans patrician class: the father an oyster-obsessed lawyer who’s studying ancient Greek, the mother a Northern transplant studiously adapting to the customs of high society Southern living. Louise, drawn to Claude and the Colliers, hangs around like a chronicler of their antics, serving as the solo audience for their performances of self. Louise’s own family is more roughly sketched. Raised by her aunts—who never appear—Louise is the heiress to a Mississippi lumber fortune, of which Mr. Collier is a trustee.The novel opens with a long party scene, the wedding reception to celebrate the union of Henry Laines and Mary Grace—peers of Claude and Louise—who offer a grim picture of marriage in the upper crust. Henry Laines is also “falling apart” because “he was made that way. He was made to scream wild declarations of love to women in dressing rooms and gardens, and then throw pots and pans on them.” And Mary Grace? “Life ran high in Mary Grace,” observes Louise. “It takes generosity to love … and she had loved many. But she was in a state of Total Chaos, among the madcap palms and honorable oaks, as society shed its bloodshot eyes upon the scene.” In Saints, the palms—like the people—are madcap, the rain slashes into the azaleas, love is a little doomed, and Louise cuts through the brush to see into the clearing of a person’s troubled soul.For the first half of the novel, it seems Lemann is content to move from one languid set piece to the next: first the wedding, then a sprawling Sunday afternoon and evening at the Colliers’. Then tragedy strikes, interrupting the rhythms of the book. In the middle of the night, Saint—Claude’s younger brother—falls from the balcony; in the morning he’s found dead in the garden. Without him, the Colliers lose their engine of purpose and suffer the stuckness of grief, the “unlawfulness” of loss.Writing for The New York Times in 1985, Michiko Kakutani described Saints as a “musically patterned novel,” its repetitions powerfully accumulating over its span. It’s a near perfect work, and even my quarrels—the on-the-nose play on words of the title (Claude’s younger brother is named Saint), the noisy gimmick of Lemann’s intermittent capitalization—are subsumed by its merits. Lemann’s repetitions of description and pronouncement are her most conspicuous flourish of style, and they imbue her prose with a hypnotic and cyclical rhythm. Her characters do things over and over too, as when Louise says at breakfast: “Scrambled eggs, scrambled eggs, scrambled eggs, scrambled eggs,” and Claude replies, “Could you, uh, reiterate that?” These repetitions arise from an artful and persistent narrator approaching her subjects again and again from slightly altered angles; they speak to a keenness to remember things just so—to preserve the memory of a place and its people.Louise is honing her observational skills, preparing for the life of a writer. But she is also placing her loved ones behind glass, protecting the artifacts of a cherished world: her home. “I don’t want it to be just in my memory,” says Claude, speaking for both of them, all. “I don’t want to forget.”Although Lives of the Saints takes place over only three months, this single season of Louise’s young adulthood lends the orbiting people and events an outsize gravitational weight. Lemann’s book inverts one of the novel’s most useful tropes: Rather than have an older Louise look back on her younger self, Saints features the young Louise enshrining this period of her life, predetermining its importance and predicting—shaping—her own future: She will become someone for whom the Summer of Claude was monumentally consequential. Rather than a book of recollections, Saints is about the willful manufacture and prioritization of memory, the curation of a nostalgia to be felt in the future. Oyster Diaries is a less heady dose of Lemann’s prose. It can feel less substantial than Saints, but its digressiveness lets in a refreshing breeze. Delery, a volunteer court monitor, lives in Washington, D.C., but she returns to New Orleans to visit her dying father. Delery sees herself in him, the man who never forgave her mother for being unfaithful; now Delery grapples with her own partner’s infidelity. Oyster Diaries is a sort of sequel to Saints, and Lemann returns to old themes, like the fallen angel Claude Collier, whom she can’t keep out of the book. In one of Delery’s remembrances of their wastrel youth, he materializes on a motorcycle wearing a black suit. Years later, they meet again, and Claude looms as the forbidden love of her life—an “old flame,” she calls him. “It is surprising how much you can love someone,” Delery reflects, although there is a “tortured quality” to her love for Claude. Claude married her dear friend Louise, a Pyrrhic victory that earns her the epithet “the long-suffering” Louise.Do people change? “No man can escape himself,” Louise observes, referring to Claude, whose excess of alcoholic kindness reads as an evasion of his own despair—a faith in others to paper over the void of faith in himself. Or as Delery sees him: “His angelic self-effacement was causing him to ruin his life. Or at least it dampened his will to fight patent infringements.”Delery and Claude share a common reverence. “He was in awe of his father,” Delery says of Claude, and she is too—of his and of her own. She is the adoring daughter of the titular oyster diarist, a lawyer who lunched: For 20 years he kept a careful record of the oysters he consumed at a restaurant across the street from the courthouse. The log includes such entries as “Sept . 19—passable” and “Sept . 29—not so hot.” Delery assesses the diary and its keeper: “It is the work of a madman.” The Oyster Diaries the novel is about the death of the fathers—Delery’s, her husband Jack’s, Claude’s, all. Squinting, one can even read the novel as an ode to a vanishing place. “You won’t find a new country,” reads the book’s opening epigraph from C.P. Cavafy. The dads are dying, taking the world with them. Claude’s father drops dead in his seersucker suit, which only further enrobes Claude in melancholy. “The hero is one already well acquainted with grief,” Delery notes. Her own father lives on and on for years, long enough to marry her best friend—once a peer, now her stepmother. Delery’s own children only pity her. Rather than deify her, her daughters see their mother as a child. Annoyed with her for suffering Jack’s transgressions, they find out about their father’s affair before she does—and force him to confess. Delery is like Louise in Saints, if Louise grew into the elder guardian of her own naïveté. “Idiotic innocence” is how Delery describes her state. For isn’t the gauzy glow of nostalgia a form of enforced naïveté—the deliberate selection of the good, the convenient omission of the bad?Ritz of the Bayou is a different kind of portrait of home. Lemann’s work of gonzo journalism is ostensibly about the corruption trial of Edwin Edwards, governor of Louisiana, but she can barely bring herself to discuss the specifics of the charges, so busy is she describing the elegance of the defense attorneys and the cracked and attractive nobility of the governor himself. A shaggy, sweaty riff on the proverb that the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know, Ritz asks who would trust, or lust after, a governor who wasn’t corrupt? Our leaders should be brutally human, she suggests, lousy with imperfection and contradiction. “A flawed thing may be more full of life than a perfect thing,” Lemann writes in Ritz; the line could serve as a summary of her broader artistic project and her attraction to the beautiful and broken. Lemann shows a weakness for white-haired men, and her writing is full of a tenderness toward the patrician Southerner, the august but fragile figure of faded glory. In Oyster Diaries, there’s the father, who marries Delery’s best friend; in Saints, there’s Mr. Collier, Claude’s father, who listens to opera while he gardens in seersucker shorts. In Ritz, there’s the defense attorney Camille Gravel, “a drawling white-haired gent of seventy” who was “perhaps the hero of the courtroom”—not to mention Governor Edwards himself, the white-haired and scandal-clad leader of Louisiana who once said the only thing that could take him down was being “caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.” Lemann, starry-eyed with esteem for the crooked man, seems to agree. Lemann doesn’t shy from grand pronouncements about the South and its people. From Saints: “The way your slip was showing,” Claude says to Louise, “it reminded me of the South.” “He had the levity of the Southerner, a brave thing, being actually desperation masked by levity.” “Southerners need carbonation.” “I was experiencing life in the slow lane—the South.” “Southerners do not like philosophical conversations.” Lemann even posits his and hers Southern traits: “his Southern-boy crackpot streak,” “his Southern inscrutability, his Southern good-old-boy aspects”; her “Southern butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth demeanor.” It was Walker Percy, Lemann’s beloved mentor, who wrote in his novel The Moviegoer about “the genie-soul of the place which every place has or else is not a place.” He observed: “One step out into the brilliant March day and there it is as big as life, the genie-soul of the place which, wherever you go, you must meet and master first thing or be met and mastered.” Nancy Lemann is a writer of uncommon commitment to capturing the genie-soul of New Orleans. Her repetitions are the persistent attempts to meet and master its memory and essence, and these three books reveal just how faithfully and lovingly Lemann has strived to capture its spirit.