I have never been to New Orleans, and I am afraid of ever going. Too strong an affinity for haunts of dissipation; too great a tendency in general to linger; too powerful a fascination with shellfish of all kinds: I am afraid the first oyster bar I walked into would finish me entirely. Old friends would stumble across me, 20 years later, still slurping the same bivalves. Nancy Lemann’s Lives of the Saints, first published in 1985 and recently reissued by NYRB Classics, does nothing to allay this fear.
The book follows a period in the life of Louise Brown, native daughter of New Orleans and recent college graduate, with nothing much to do upon her return from the east, except to hear “dawlin” bellowed by old family friends across the Sazerac Bar, perform haphazard secretarial work at a law firm, and drift in and out of the Collier home.
The Colliers live, fortuitously, at the corner of Indulgence and Religion, in one of the “antebellum mansions sunk awry on their foundations.” Mr. Collier translates Homer and considers the great questions; his wife is a transplanted Yankee. They still dress in evening wear for dinner; their black butler, Chester, wears a tuxedo and mixes drinks. Their son, Claude, invented a distinctive patented shrimp peeler after slipping on a banana peel and dropping out of college (not in that order). Its earnings, along with horse track bets, fund his dissipated late 20s. Louise is hopelessly in love with him. Eventually, a tragedy strikes; he leaves for the north, and she, after getting herself dismissed from the office for setting a trash can on fire and other mishaps, follows him.
This is, technically, the plot of a novel. It feels more like a series of visions, lightning-illuminated tableaus seen through wrought-iron scrollwork, stitched together with a logic usually found only in dreams. Characters collapse, drift off, declaim in ancient Greek to undefined audiences in walled gardens, remark with ecstatic wonder on the scrambling of eggs, and repeat themselves 20 pages later. They are always having breakdowns, the way an actress in a 1940s film noir will suddenly accelerate mid-speech, break off, turn her face from the camera, clasp her hands, and give one sharp strangled sob in a mid-Atlantic accent.
Even more than they are always having breakdowns, the characters are always telling each other that someone else is having a breakdown. New Orleans is gossipy, exuberantly incestuous, a hall of mirrors whose inhabitants are filled with “the mock-amazed congeniality of New Orleanians confronted with the spectacle of one another.” This is how we first encounter Louise: at a society wedding, magisterially surveying the breakdowns:
“Everyone had breakdowns at this wedding. 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.”
Louise says that she came to the wedding “armed with a philosophical acquiescence” she had picked up from the poets, but in practice, “their principles did not hold weight. Everyone was too drunk. Everyone was unglued.”
Throughout the novel, Louise’s voice is self-assured, by turns blase and earnest, and heart-rendingly young, bubbling with the upwelling of a barely controlled screwball goofiness. Her voice is both Lemann’s own delicious creation as well as a recognizable entry in a tradition. Some readers will be reminded of The Dud Avocado’s Sally Jay Gorce, another daughter of privilege in her wastrel youth phase. But Louise’s point of view belongs to a distinctly Southern type of roman a clef: a young woman, a returned or aspiring prodigal, endowed with a strong mind and a dry wit, hopelessly entangled in a kind of regional family romance, assessing and translating the scenes of her childhood. It is, implicitly, the point of view of To Kill a Mockingbird’s backward-looking adult narrator; it is the point of view that netted Kathryn Stockett’s The Help 15 million sales and a major motion picture deal.
As far as I can discover, Lives of the Saints did not sell 15 million copies, perhaps because, unlike The Help, it offers no uplifting narrative of progress toward racial equality in America. Black New Orleans barely appears in the narrative except as maids and butlers in the background, which is probably to the novel’s credit. If you want to write a book about a decadent aristocratic enclave, you should just do that, rather than insult a different set of subjects by pretending a token interest in their perspectives as a kind of defensive maneuver.
Sales notwithstanding, the extended opening wedding scene alone is worth the price of admission to Lives of the Saints. We swim in and out of conversations emerging from a general background clamor — sometimes in the gun room with someone’s red-faced father, sometimes in a group of old biddies discussing what they wore in their antediluvian debutante days. The antics of various eccentrics appear at a distance, and then suddenly, too close. A man you have known all your life is giving an intoxicated disquisition on Women with a capital “W.” Lemann precisely recreates the experience of attending the kind of wedding where everyone has been intimately acquainted with each other’s foibles since childhood, and no fewer than one attendee must be named Mary Grace.
“No one thought it was unusual that Henry Laines should be screaming my name instead of [his bride’s] at his wedding reception on the dance floor,” Louise tells us, “because everyone was too drunk to care. That is what it is like at parties where everyone is too drunk.”
Louise and her peers love to number and explain the many types of things in the world: what it is like at the type of party where everyone is too drunk, how Henry Laines is the type of person who, if you gave him half a chance, would grab you by the collar and start screaming about fame. Usually, the construction “he was the type of person who” has predictive power. We use it before some hypothetical future action that the person in question would be likely to do. In Lives of the Saints, being a type of person explains the past; specifically, some hyper-specific and outrageous act of dereliction or eccentricity that has just been committed before the reader’s eyes.
If there is a unifying factor undergirding the frenetic and drunken expressions of all these different types, it is New Orleans itself. Lush, overgrown, decaying, overflowing, watery New Orleans, whose denizens are always dealing with an excess of liquid: taking another drink, mopping their brows, watching the rain slash the azaleas.
In New Orleans, continence is a sign of sterility. A “stern calm” is said to exist between Mr. and Mrs. Collier: “The chilly, formal air between them, their manner with each other – they occupied a chilly corridor — I can’t explain their dry behavior, their unearthly calm.”
MAGAZINE: THE DRESS CODE IS A GREAT EQUALIZER
Claude Collier, on the other hand, is irresistible, and Claude Collier is doomed because he is immediately identified with damp, rainy New Orleans. “In his suit and tie, Claude looked slightly unusual, so old-fashioned, a little stark, in his dark suit and overstarched white shirt, with a sodden, gin-like fragrance as though he had taken too long of a shower, a Southern habit originally brought on by fear of heat.”
Claude never says or does much, other than appearing and disappearing and possibly committing crimes off-stage. But Louise is hopelessly bamboozled by Claude and the watery dissolution in him that reads, maybe only in New Orleans, as a kind of purity. It will not end well for anyone. But oh, to visit New Orleans and sit in decrepit oaken bars, and to have one’s collar turned down and be called “Darling” by a shady gentleman, friend to all wrecks, winos, and wack jobs, who makes the whole world seem kind, and who possesses, like his city, all of the world’s dark magic.
Clare Coffey is a writer from Pennsylvania.