Featured image : author Nancy Lemann
The book’s setting sets sensations in the reader: decadent , upper-crust New Orleans, where desultory people, young and old drink heroic quantities of gin, embark on doomed marriages and affairs, generally going to seed. Its a portrait of the thick, independent, entangled community within which these eccentrics thrive. The virtues and morals of this Southern hothouse are as lucid as those of Jane Austen and George Elliot’s provincial outposts.
We learn that Claude, the narrator’s clumsy love interest , is not only “kind” and honourable” but also likes people more the longer he has known them. The narrator also knows that Claude’s father has been eating a dozen oysters at noon in the Pearl every day for four decades and that Claude’s great-great-grandfather came to Louisiana from Germany in 1836. The verb tenses that scaffold this fictional world indicate reliable recurrences of a dim, shared past in a nostalgia-soaked present: one aging grandee “always quotes from” a dreaded verse history of the Civil War, and a senescent debutant trots out”the story of the Countless Offers.” The aimless narrator’s return to New Orleans after her four years at a Northeastern college is a clever device with which to reconstruct this milieu for us the readers. It is not a world you long to join or one whose passing you lament— a world where black people serve white “wasted youth”, where parties are staged unselfconsciously at plantations, where a typical setting includes”everyone screaming for the black maids, with vivid colours of black maids in white unicorns on the velvet green lawn.
These characters inhabit less a stratum than a caste— one that you cant help but feel deserved the same ultimate Breakdown as most of its members. But to thread the needle so deftly on such people is the supreme achievement of the novel’s voice: deadpan, hilarious, histrionic, anthropological, fatalistic. Many of us cling to similar credos like ”she does not write this off—i could only love one person. This was my intimate principle unlike other sentiments of her youth- with her awkward glance, and that seemed, and seems important to me.” In what the narrator might call the cold Yankee North, like relics of a bygone era, but maybe we don’t have to let them go. Lemann’s language is very singular, very much her own- she writes in an old -school way, capitalising certain words. You hear the voice of the narrator, Louise- a young disenchanted kind of aimless paralegal, who spends her night cavorting with Claude Collier. Its a funny book, finding myself bursting into laughter at certain points. Then something happens, half way through the book— something horrible. Nothing has prepared you for it. The tone of the book is light and lunatic, and suddenly; life intervenes in the worst way.
Lemann’s writing is a stamp of her own. Sha uses repetition- coming back to same themes and words over and over again. She obviously loves New Orleans, a town she is rhapsodic about. Louise Brown grew up here and went to college at Brown. After college she returns home, having studied English literature. She has no prospects, but gets a job in a local law firm, which she hates. While at a big society wedding she runs into an old friend- Claude Collier who is a wreck, a dissipated wreck, but with an old-world type of elegance. He wears seersucker suits, drinks too much. He is jolly, everyone loves him, always getting into scraps. He has an insane family. But Claude is in trouble. He has gotten involved with winos and race-track habitues.
Louise watches as everything goes to shit.
Nothing happens, because this book is not about its plot. Its a book about mood, and atmosphere, late nights in jazz clubs and the funny conversations you have with your friends. Nancy Lemann is the patron saint of oddballs and delinquents, conjuring scenes of booze-soaked calamity, where everyone and everything is on the verge of rot. She is one of the most unusual voices in American fiction, unabashedly digressive , weirdly and wonderfully confiding, as witty as it is melancholic and an endless surprise. “People fall apart easily here”, Louise Brown remarks less than twenty pages into LIVES OF THE SAINTS and describing a groom pithily described thus: “ by profession he was a starving artist, and by temperament, a bachelor.” I am not acquainted with Southern literature but i know how to recognise the hallmarks of tragedy and instability couched in exquisite manners and deference, and I enjoy how Lemann plays with them.
Its easy to become invested in the story’s people, but at its core its Claude’s story with Louise as a devoted and sane, although biased by love, an observer. She is there to chronic what happens when its time for him to fall apart, spinning out after a family tragedy, and later, being caught by the consequences of his recklessness. At only 144 pages, the story flies along and reading feels like an intense, breathless conversation at breakneck speed. Try not falling into her hot, humid New Orleans , full of mad, eccentric, reserved people.
