“There are just three big cities in the United States that are ‘story cities’—New York, of course, New Orleans, and, best of the lot, San Francisco.” The line is Frank Norris’s, but it’s better known as the epigraph of O. Henry’s “A Municipal Report” (1909), the municipality being Nashville, as if chosen to prove Norris wrong. Well, New York—of course. San Francisco I’m not so sure about. It’s better in the movies, even if Vertigo was based on a French thriller, and as for the rest of the country, Norris couldn’t have predicted how Chicago would develop, much less Los Angeles.

But New Orleans is a different matter. It really is a “story city,” and not just because it too is a port with a complicated racial history, the most complicated, in the early days, of any American entrepôt. It’s the city where George Washington Cable set “The ‘Haunted House’ in Royal Street” (1889), about a mysterious French Quarter beauty in the 1830s who got so much pleasure out of torturing her slaves that even the antebellum world knew horror. It’s Kate Chopin’s city too, the home of The Awakening, and also the place where William Faulkner found his voice and then set the eeriest chapters of Absalom, Absalom!

I know it only as a reader and a tourist. But speaking as a reader, it does seem that nothing stays buried in New Orleans, and not just because the graves in its fabled flood-prone cemeteries are all above ground. Lost histories become legible, and in the immediate aftermath of World War II Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire provided an unforgettable picture of the town’s vigor and decay, while Robert Penn Warren used the charm and corruption of the entire state of Louisiana as the stage for All the King’s Men.

Still, those aren’t the only stories the city has to tell. Everybody’s a sinner in the land where the saints go marching in, but some people do it in seersucker and pearls, and upper-crust white New Orleans has been the setting for some superb novels of manners, fine-grained accounts of a closed-off world. Three or four families in a country village, Jane Austen said in defining her subject, but make it five or six in the Uptown neighborhoods, where the city seems small enough to be knowable, and then build a sense of pressure from the world outside. That’s the terrain of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer and of Elizabeth Spencer’s The Snare, whose title refers to the city itself. And it is also the world of Percy’s disciple Nancy Lemann, whose two sad screwball comedies of the 1980s are now back in print, accompanied by The Oyster Diaries, her first new book in more than twenty years.

Lives of the Saints, first published in 1985, makes no explicit reference to the old song, familiar from football games and funerals alike, and yet it’s everywhere felt in the syncopation of Lemann’s prose. It’s been a long time since I read a novel whose language seemed so engagingly mannered or from which I wanted to quote so much. It starts with a wedding that its narrator, the mousily named Louise Brown, describes as one where

everyone had breakdowns…including the bride and groom. Especially the bride and groom. Crowded parties like at the Stewarts’ often can be known to Bring on Breakdowns. Especially if the Stewarts are the hosts.

Repetitive? No. Let’s call it reiteration, an amplification that seems less linguistic than rhythmic, sonic, even musical. Including the bride and groom. Now hit that phrase again but make it louder, let us hear those horns. Especially the bride and groom. Or maybe Lemann will bend a note, shift its grammar a bit. One of her characters has the habit of “shredding napkins, matchbooks, and cigarette packages” and goes on to fill “about three ashtrays with shreddings.” That s makes the verb a noun; the word doubles itself, and in the same sentence too.

The groom’s breakdown makes him scream for other women, the bride’s makes her want to go off with another man, and everyone without exception is drunk and “unglued.” They’re having multiple breakdowns, one right after another, they’re cracking up, they glue themselves together again only so that they can break down once more, and this is entirely accepted and normal on a “sweltering April night” in New Orleans. All in all, it’s “one of the worst events in my experience, tragic in society.” Not tragic, but “tragic in society,” in the particular part of society that calls itself society, where people shriek with delight and dismay and no one can tell the difference. It’s a voice—Louise’s, or Lemann’s—that undercuts its own hyperbole and yet allows for it, too: an attitude summed up by what’s described as “the mock-amazed congeniality of New Orleanians confronted with the spectacle of one another.” That amazement is a put-on. The congeniality is real.

The wedding guests include everyone Louise has ever known, “plus a party of out-of-towners whose broad Memphis and Charleston accents shocked me, although we were the same, Americans far from that hub of the universe along the East Coast.” The same? Perhaps to people from Boston, who can’t hear the difference between those shockingly different Deep South accents. But to Louise herself, who can hear it? There’s a hall-of-mirrors quality to this southern schtick, a deliberately unsettled point of view in which every statement seems both true and false at once, and clichés are the writer’s best friend. So Louise announces that “southerners need carbonation” as an accident-prone little boy sits “swilling Cokes” after a visit to the emergency room, while “youthful folly” has its season in New Orleans, and “its season is youth.” The napkin shredder at the wedding tells her that her slip is showing and then says that it reminds him of the South. At which point this New Englander knows that there’s a joke in there somewhere and hopes it’s not on him.

It’s a young person’s book—Lemann wasn’t yet thirty when it appeared—and reading it now I wonder how it would have struck me if I’d read it then, back when I was young myself. I doubt I would have heard so much in it, though I would have recognized its “wastrel-youth contingent” as a version of Evelyn Waugh’s bright young people; Lemann’s epigraph comes from Waugh’s autobiography, and I too was steeped in his fictional world. But there are other echoes of that dandy tradition here as well, hints of Wilde, of Eliot’s Prufrock, and also of Nancy Mitford. Delery Anhalt, the narrator of The Oyster Diaries, speaks of her own “rabid Anglophilia,” and despite its regional specificity Lives of the Saints owes more in formal terms to those brittle English models than it does to American ones. What separates it from them, and from Waugh’s books especially, is its sweetness.

That sweetness is a function of its faith, and by that I don’t mean anything as simple as religious belief. Waugh was thrilled and appalled by the world he created in books like Vile Bodies, and more than half hated the people he put into them. Lemann isn’t in the least appalled, and more than half loves the ones she puts into hers. Many of them are absurd. Mrs. Stewart, the mother of that errant bride, likes nothing more than to “spend an entire afternoon talking about what hat she wore when she was fifteen,” and in that she is rivaled by her mother-in-law, who enjoys remembering the “shoe sizes her friends wore in 1910.” Yet these are the absurdities of Austen’s Miss Bates, not of Waugh’s merciless Margot Metroland. The two Mrs. Stewarts belong to a world that Lemann takes for granted, however keen her irony, and the faith in Lives of the Saints has to do with her city’s ready acceptance of “youthful folly,” and with what lies beyond it.

For Louise the best part of that wedding comes when the napkin shredder, a young man named Claude Collier, “turned my collar down and called me Darling.” Nothing so strange about that, everyone here calls other people Darling, and yet the tenderness with which he does it shocks her even more than those accents. It feels “uncharacteristic. I had known him for so many years,” and it surprises her into something like love. At some undefined point that love seems to become sexual, but what matters more is that these two stand as the essential witnesses to each other’s life. Claude needs that. He is kindness personified, somebody other people love because he looks so fascinated by everything they do. But in his late twenties he is not, his father says, “using his abilities.” He drinks three cocktails “in the time that it took me to drink one”; he never finished college, doesn’t work at anything much, and seems instead to have made a career of solicitousness, attending to others but never himself. He is at once brilliant and unbookish, and professes to be mystified when people find him strange. Nobody believes him when he says he’s just “normal,” and reading about him made me remember a line from The Moviegoer in which a young woman is described as possessing “an antic sort of seriousness, which is not seriousness at all but despair masquerading as seriousness.”

That’s Claude. Is it also Louise? Is she only a witness, or do her observations mask some crisis of her own? She tells us very little about herself and seems essentially without parents; instead she’s as absorbed with Claude as he is with everyone else. Or absorbed, rather, by her concern for his entire family. There’s his father, a federal judge and amateur classicist named St. Louis Collier, and his much younger brother, also called St. Louis, the one known as Louis and the other as Saint. Louis, Louise—she could be the family’s missing daughter. Claude’s mother, meanwhile, is a “Yankee girl” Mr. Collier met at Harvard who has come down to New Orleans as to an alien land, a world of carnival balls and ebullient ossified tradition. “A stern calm” dominates her relations with her husband; something has happened there, though Louise doesn’t quite know what. She knows only that Mrs. Collier expects the worst, and about halfway through that worst will come.

A dark comedy, an alcohol-soaked idyll. And yet there is faith indeed, and trust. Not belief, not a quest for certainty, but a search for purpose and meaning that derives from Percy, who suggests that such a search might in itself be purpose enough. Youthful folly has its season, but in New Orleans that season is like the heat, and goes on longer than anywhere else. Seasons do change, however, and this reader at least suspends his disbelief. Claude finds something he cares about doing, for a while at least. He begins to use his talents, and yet to Louise he remains embroiled in “shady things…which did not fit into his character.” But they do, and on the novel’s last page he says that though he’s “not the person you portray,” it does matter that she sees him that way. “You are my heart,” this damaged saint tells our suddenly unreliable narrator, and then he turns down Bourbon Street and disappears.

That ending pulls the novel together, but for much of its length it appears as aimless as a pub crawl, a series of well-honed sketches of New Orleans life. On Sunday evenings Mr. Collier lights six cigars and with three “lodged…between the fingers” of each hand retreats to his library; a young lawyer at the firm where Louise works as a typist interrupts a mailroom conversation to ask what she would do “if your dog had rabies because it wasn’t blessed.”

Lemann’s one book of nonfiction, The Ritz of the Bayou (1987), which grew out of a failed assignment for Vanity Fair, is even more piercingly observed. In his introduction to this new edition James Wolcott recalls once hearing her fret about the difficulties of plot, and she was probably right to. She has an eye and an ear but not a conventional sense of structure, and when the magazine sent the young novelist to cover the 1985 criminal trial of Louisiana’s governor Edwin Edwards, she couldn’t manage to make the charges against him seem clear. She does name them—“racketeering, fraud, and bribery”—and notes that they involved hospitals and Las Vegas alike. But the details are impossible to follow, though in fairness many of Edwards’s co-conspirators didn’t understand them either. Vanity Fair killed the story; that didn’t stop Knopf from taking it on.

As a piece of journalism The Ritz of the Bayou stands as a kissing cousin to Hunter S. Thompson. Edwards was then in his third of four terms, and outside the state he is best remembered for his openly crooked honesty; during one campaign he boasted that the only way he could lose “is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.” His trial had a lot of “human frailty floating around,” and that, Lemann writes, is the sort of thing that puts “my ticker…back in business.”

Her account is at least as concerned with her own ticker as it is with the trial, and yet it also holds a place in a curious line of books about Louisiana’s governors. There’s Warren’s All the King’s Men, which turned Huey Long into an extraordinary character called Willie Stark, showing where he came from and why he rose and fell. That’s tragedy, both on the page and in historical fact as well. Some years after his assassination Long’s younger brother Earl was also elected to that office, a man who once said that if the state’s people ever got good government they wouldn’t like it. Late in life he traveled with the stripper Blaze Starr and became the posthumous subject of A.J. Liebling’s vividly reported The Earl of Louisiana (1961). That’s farce. The self-described “lizard” Edwards—and The Ritz of the Bayou itself—are whatever comes after farce. The state suffered; the prose didn’t.

The trial was held in federal court in New Orleans, and for Lemann it is all theatrics and mood. The book is only loosely chronological and written in “short spurts or vignettes,” most of them under a page in length—a snatch of overheard conversation, a paragraph of rumor, a comment on the local oysters. She rides in an elevator with Edwards, who tells her she’s too pretty to be a reporter; she observes his perpetually “joshing” clan of hangers-on, notes the never-understated clothing of his wife and daughter, and ends by developing a crush on an elderly defense lawyer. Sometimes she quotes the commentary of a dry-witted figure she calls the “courtroom existentialist,” and at night she sits over cocktails with her fellow journalists in the bar at the Lafayette Hotel. Lemann is more or less convinced that Edwards is guilty, but nobody is surprised when it all ends first in a mistrial and later an acquittal. People in Louisiana have been doing business this way for a long time; they know how to “live with themselves,” and truth is a relative term.

It’s certainly not anything the trial itself provides, though at the turn of the millennium Edwards did find himself in jail on a set of other charges. What becomes clear, however, is that the trial stands as Lemann’s pretext for sorting out her relation to the world from which she came. Not that her own slice of Louisiana has much in common with the governor’s. He’s country, a hardscrabble Cajun populist. She’s city and educated, a well-off New Orleanian who is also at home in New York, and sometimes the snobbery shows. Just where does she fit? She loves the South’s green heat, but is there a place for her in it? Where and who and with whom does she want to be? Yet Lemann tells us almost nothing about her own circumstances; the questions hang, and the book is marked instead by a sharp sense of the unspoken.

Still, we do eventually realize that the courtroom existentialist is a member of her own family, and that she’s in love. The voice on the other end of her frequent phone calls has a Boston accent, but it isn’t going well, and at a certain point she leaves the trial behind and drives two hundred miles to the hotel of her title in order to face a set of her own undescribed “sorrows,” troubles bad enough to make her feel that “I too was cracking up.” The Ritz of the Bayou is very funny, and a lot of its comedy comes from the same kind of reiterative drumbeat that characterizes Lives of the Saints. She writes that “the juror who has blackouts had a blackout and we had to adjourn for the day,” and at one point she repeats the phrase “human frailty” six times in three short paragraphs, which really does convince you that there’s a lot of it floating around down there. But the book’s center, its emotional ballast, isn’t finally in that courtroom, and what sticks with me is her own frailty, and her strength too, the strength that allows for the care and craft behind this picture of a narrator on the edge.

Lives of the Saints was first published by Knopf and then kept in print for years by the Louisiana State University Press, part of a handsome line of trade paperbacks called Voices of the South. It has always had its readers, but the three novels that followed were not so lucky, and they remain hard to find. Sportsman’s Paradise (1992) and Malaise (2002) concern displaced southerners—New York, California—while the third, The Fiery Pantheon (1999), begins at a grand hotel in the Virginia mountains and draws on some of the same families as Lives of the Saints. The latter’s reappearance in company with a new novel has produced its share of profiles and reviews, but nothing I’ve read has said much about its author’s long silence; maybe that gap between books is just something to note, and no more. The Oyster Diaries does, however, present me with a peculiar set of qualms and scruples. Lemann’s brother, the historian and journalist Nicholas Lemann, has a book of his own out this spring, a memoir called Returning.¹ It describes their family’s long history in Louisiana, from an ancestor’s arrival in 1836 as a peddler from Germany, a typical business for Jewish immigrants of the time, through the decades of steadily rising fortune that culminated in the legal career of the siblings’ rigorously nonobservant father, Thomas, and finally Nicholas’s return to a life of Jewish practice. The book is genuinely informative about both the South and the history of American Judaism, and I wish I had not read it.

As writers the siblings don’t seem to share much. His prose is the journalist’s classic windowpane; hers is anything but. She finds her guide to their story city in Walker Percy; he takes his cues from All the King’s Men and on the page is far more concerned with race and the legacy of slavery. But the two of them do share a common formation, a set of family tales, of secrets and silences, and in reading it’s hard to forget all that, however much I try. It’s one thing to note the links between Nancy Lemann’s own books. Claude Collier returns in the new one, for example, and she traces out his later and still-disheveled life. That includes a brief marriage to Louise, who has exchanged her own nominal Judaism for a set of “saintly Catholic ways.” Which doesn’t necessarily mean she’s a Catholic. Delery’s father is a scholarly lawyer devoted to the study of Latin grammar, and in extreme old age he begins to unravel the cigars he’s now forbidden to smoke. Earlier on, however, he spends years on a diary that rates and records the oysters he eats each day for lunch; so too does the courtroom existentialist in The Ritz of the Bayou. But when I read in Returning of a once-inexplicable coolness in the marriage of the Lemann parents, and then match it up to that of the Colliers’ marriage in Lives of the Saints, and again to Delery’s parents in the new book, adding in Thomas Lemann’s own well-documented oyster habit…well, I’d rather not.²

So let’s bracket it. Lemann has always drawn on her own biography, but let’s not go down that intertextual rabbit hole; let’s refuse the so often self-serious game of peekaboo that autofiction plays with the reader, daring you to confuse author and narrator, daring you not to. It’s “annoying,” to borrow one of this narrator’s favorite words, even though Lemann herself is tempted by it. Why else would she give Delery two brothers instead of the one she actually has? But that veil seems too transparent to distract us much, and in both its humor and its tight-lipped asperity that very word, “annoying,” is enough to suggest a way around the problem. Neither of those qualities is one that I associate with the genre’s most regular practitioners, and I’m going to try instead to characterize The Oyster Diaries as it might appear to a reader who comes to it clean, maybe having read Lives of the Saints but no more.

The style has kept the same rhythms, but after almost forty years it’s grown a bit blunter. Lemann’s early narrators were flippant; this one is ticked off. She’s impatient too, performs impatience, rather, an impatience with the way things are and the way they go on and on without ever getting any better. I don’t have time for this, she seems to say, and yet Delery also likes the aggravation, or at least she likes Kierkegaard, who is “everything I adore: he’s in a bad mood, everything annoys him, and he is not afraid to repeat himself.”

The book’s opening pages appear unstudied in the way that comes only after a great deal of work, a tartly phrased “Diary of Remorse,” remorse being a “more violent” emotion than mere regret. In her volunteer job at the criminal court Delery finds herself “madly defending” a man who exposed himself, which makes one of her daughters say that she has “Stockholm syndrome for the patriarchy.” That’s a pang, and she also keeps a list of her own faults; she’s self-absorbed, heartless, boring, lazy, unkind, and obsessed with criticizing her in-laws. More remorse, and yet for her that emotion has one cause above all: New Orleans itself, “because I don’t live there now.” Being away from it makes her feel as though her heart’s in lockdown, and with that, Delery says, “the tragedies begin.”

Those tragedies include her mother’s early death and many years later her father’s. She has long since made peace with his second marriage, to a woman just a few years older than she is, but while “my mother had been a force to be reckoned with…my stepmother was a force that could not be reckoned with,” and she finds it hard to recognize that the necessary decisions about his last illness and care are not fully hers to make. Then there’s some trouble in her own marriage, which sends her back to Shakespeare, seeking a guide to villainy. She has, she thinks, been too innocent, a “quixotic” delusory innocence, and that makes her remember the boys she dated in her twenties, who “each… broke my heart, each one in a different yet hauntingly similar way.” Yet as she streams a production of Don Giovanni she feels bereft when Mozart’s character goes down at the end to hell—a cad, sure, but one who still makes that ticker “beat faster.”

It will all finish with her soul properly “calibrated” at last, and in reading I had a pair of not quite conflicting thoughts. The first was that I’m not sure this is a novel. The second is that it doesn’t matter. The Oyster Diaries is made up of eight free-standing sections, each presented in the kind of “short spurts”—a paragraph, a page—that characterize her other work. They reinforce and build on one another, and yet they aren’t precisely chapters; I wouldn’t recommend taking them in any other order than the one Lemann has given them, but almost all of them could be read on their own. The only one that seems like a conventional story is called “Love in the Ruins”—Percy again—and starts with what she describes as a typically New Orleans “narrow escape,” a traffic accident “beneath the green arcade of oaks,” before going on to detail the later life of Claude and Louise. The rhetorical register of the others is far closer to that of the essay—digressive, reminiscent, even ruminative—while the concluding “Lions and Daughters” begins like a glossy travel piece before veering into an unnerving minor key.

So, not a novel, as Handel’s Water Music is not a symphony. It is instead a suite of prose dances, of more-or-less fictional moments. What matters more than any such question of category is that this mind is on every page an interesting place to be. Not a comfortable one, never that; there’s no comfort to be found in someone who tells us that while “self-loathing is bad…there is a fine line between self-loathing and self-awareness.” But interesting, whether that mind belongs to Delery Anhalt or to Nancy Lemann herself.