Biblioklept

Let us begin with confession: until a review copy of the new NYRB reissue landed in my mailbox a few months ago, I had never heard of Nancy Lemann or her 1985 debut novel Lives of the Saints. I didn’t know its cult reputation. I didn’t know its sharp-eyed narrator, Louise, or her object of fascination, Claude Collier. I didn’t know its portrait of New Orleans in the 1980s, or its tragicomic rendering of the breakdowns and crack-ups of established Garden District families. I didn’t know how fucking good this novel is.

Here is, roughly, what the novel is “about”: Lives of the Saints follows post-collegiate Louise as she chronicles the unraveling lives of the city’s old families, especially the Colliers and their elusive, magnetic prodigal boy Claude. Louise is simultaneously an insider who has grown up around these families, but also positioned somehow as an outsider looking in, untethered to her own family. As the novel ambles to a tragic climax, Louise’s observations on the Colliers emerge as a kind of witnessing, a kind of love. The novel is funny and odd and deeply compelling, great sentence after great sentence, told in Louise’s bright, frank cadence.

Lemann establishes her narrator’s sharp, funny mind immediately. Here’s the novel’s opening paragraph:

All in all, Henry Laines’ wedding was one of the worst events in my experience, tragic in society. Everyone that I have ever known was there, 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.

I could sit around and unpack this opening salvo all day, but instead I’ll simply offer that it hooked me from the get-go. Those are some great sentences. We see here Louise’s mind thumbing through categories — fast, blunt, oddly formal, a bit acid. She quickly diagnoses Henry Laines’ nuptials: “Everyone had breakdowns at this wedding…Everyone was too drunk. Everyone was unglued.” This breakdown, this ungluing is the sociopsychic fabric of balmy New Orleans.

Louise’s phrasing tilts toward faux-romantic capital-letter verdicts, as when she notes that parties like the Laines wedding are known to “Bring On Breakdowns.” She is constantly formalizing this loose, chaotic world for her audience, and this “Very Long Party” at the novel’s outset is a fun, sweltering, oppressive initiation into the Garden District’s sweaty, decaying aristocracy. Drunken bridegroom Henry screams; revelers scream back. The party works its way into a loud, sweating organism that refuses to die. An all-caps “I LOVE YOU, GODDAMNIT!” rings out –devotion or threat? Louise watches it all with fanatic steadiness.

Claude Collier steps into this chaos and subtly changes its moral temperature. Lemann introduces him obliquely. Louise observes Claude, and then she observes how she observes Claude. “I noticed that,” she tells the reader (and no one else), after seeing Claude give (broken) Henry “a funny, somewhat pitying look” across the room. Claude’s own assessment is equally understated: “I think Henry is falling apart.” That diagnosis soon expands: “Everyone is falling apart.” These declarations are delivered like weather reports. But there’s nothing glib here. Indeed, Claude is a moral center in the chaotic universe Louise relates, and even if he himself is a victim of that chaos, “Claude Collier made the world seem kind.”

Kindness in Lives of the Saints evinces as labor, habit, reflex. Louise describes Claude’s “indiscriminate kindness” as “the meaning of generosity.” Mary Grace, Henry’s bride, remarks that Claude is the sort of person who “would give an ant a funeral.” Louise intuits that it’s Claude’s patience, his ears, that allow for radical kindness:

He could take chaos — though not his own — and turn it into a calm simplicity.

It was that he listened so intently, that he understood. He was not lofty, or he did not tend to philosophize. It was not like that. It was the air about him, gentle and uncorrupt, some steady, noble thing. He was constant. He was steadfast. If you were his friend, you were his friend for life.

Claude’s kindness and radical attention serve as a moral center at the core of Lives of the Saints. This is not to say that Lemann’s novel drifts into any stodgy piety. She grounds her novel in a delicious mix of the concrete and the absurd. For instance, Claude leaves physical traces of himself wherever he goes, littering dining room tables and barroom countertops with napkin shreds and chewed straws. He wears a “ludicrous apparatus called Acqua-Pac, for hangovers” like a ridiculous crown. His family speaks in surreal domestic riddles (“Are there any banana brains in this room?”) and greets disaster with surreal, charming, mordant clarity:

“I’m falling apart,” Claude announced calmly, deadpan, standing melodramatically in the middle of the room.

I laughed.

“She’s falling apart,” he said, pointing at me.

Mrs. Collier regarded him intently, despairingly.

“This family is in crisis,” Mrs. Collier said in her family’s curious deadpan.

“Now, now, Jane,” said Mr. Collier, “let’s all keep calm,” he said.

“I’m calm,” said Mrs. Collier.

“Let’s all keep very, very calm,” said Mr. Collier.

“We’re calm,” said Claude.

“This family is made up of emotional cripples,” said Mrs. Collier.

“It’s good to be an emotional cripple,” said Mr. Collier cheerfully.

“I like being an emotional cripple. It’s the only way to be. An emotional cripple.” He puffed on his cigar.

Claude’s kindness expands well past the venerable Garden District. He spends time with “wino lunatics…racestrack habits…other weird types of wrecks,” and shares money and booze alike with these outsiders. He frequents the Wakamba Club among “wrecked types of weirdos,” which, like, of course he is one too, a wrecked type of weirdo. Louise doesn’t romanticize this weirdo world; she simply tracks where Claude’s attention goes, and how easily it breaks the boundaries other less-wrecked folks (which is to say, normies) rely on for order’s sake.

Louise’s own relentless attention simultaneously anchors and propels the novel. She notices everything: shirt collars, cracked voices, unnamed rituals, sweaty seersucker suits, baggy Bermuda shorts, gin and tonic and lemons and limes, and the way certain families require constant crises to keep functioning. Late in the book she names her vocation plainly: “It is this passing parade which I chronicle.”

Midway through Lives of the Saints, a calamity strikes the Collier household, reframing the novel’s emotional scale. Lemann treats the tragedy less as a hoary plot point than as a shift in air pressure. The hyperbolic spectacle of breakdowns at the Laines’ wedding registered as public choreography. After the Colliers’ tragedy, the world narrows to something more private, stark, and sincere. Louise tries to comfort her dearest friend Claude:

It was his way to claim that he had never known despair, but I believe he had, even before this. I think it followed him down the green boulevards, and was his frequent companion. It told him that his desires were futile and that it is futile to hope or expect things, that hope is a tinsel thing which vainly flaps its tinsel wing, and told Claude therefore to be strong, alone. “Repair it by flight,” said St. Augustine. But no man can Escape Himself.

Nevertheless, Claude will try to escape himself. He boards a train for New York and then keeps going, carrying his grief, habits, sweetness, and jittery competence into colder air. Up in the Yankee North, Claude turns his restless attention to projects that sound half crackpot, half plausible, including “two compass-like instruments.” Our prodigal kid would like to find his way. It is both funny and oddly moving that the same man who cannot stop compulsively shredding napkins to bits also cannot stop composing lists of “ideas,” as if invention might serve the same purpose as manners, a way to keep calm, a way to keep other people from falling apart.

Such moments are sad but never sour. Lemann’s control of tone moves the novel’s mood between comedy and grief without glib sentimentality or maudlin posturing. Even at the edge of catastrophe, Claude remains Claude: fixing drinks, asking questions too blunt to be polite, taking the city’s most formal rituals as occasions for his deadpan curiosity. Consider the following mordantly comic scenario, which captures the South’s slow-draining, stifling decadence:

Claude was still sitting in the kitchen, fixing drinks for whoever came in and striking up weird conversations with them. He was talking to the undertaker.

It happened that the undertaker was a darkly glamorous twenty-nine-year-old man born in Paris. The funeral home was the family business, generations-old, elaborate and sumptuous, and the city’s oldest, a society funeral home. They were a society family. Claude had beckoned the undertaker into the kitchen, saying he wanted to “talk shop.” Then he asked the undertaker what kind of funeral he would like to have himself, after seeing so many other people’s funerals, and what kind of burial he would like to have. The glamorous undertaker said, “I would like to be exploded.”

“You mean, exploded, like with dynamite, at the funeral?” said Claude.

“Yes.”

This was Claude’s kind of person.

If that don’t float your boat I don’t know what to do for you.

“Tell me about your breakdowns…That’s what we’re all about down here…Breakdowns,” Claude says early in the novel, repeating the novel’s byword. And, as we might expect in a novel about breakdowns, Lives of the Saints refuses the satisfactions of a resolved plot. It frays, wanders, digresses, and vanishes into phone calls and absences. Lemann ends her first novel in the kind of disappearance that will resonate with anyone who’s loved someone who could not quite remain present. The final moments are actually a bit devastating, as I revisit them now. It all feels terribly real, like real life, with none of the teleological neatness of an ordered plot. The story does not “conclude” so much as it breaks down into the lived texture of drift, obsession, loyalty, unfinished longing.

There is more Nancy Lemann to read though, and even more of Claude Collier too; he shows up in her new novel The Oyster Diaries, which is being published concurrently by NYRB. Her follow up to Lives of the Saints, the journalistic not-novel Ritz of the Bayou has also been reissued (by Hub City Press). I’d love to see reissues of later novels like Sportsman’s Paradise and The Fiery Pantheon (which, if I’m correct feature some Collier characters) hit shelves too, and my guess is that we’ll reprints sooner rather than later.

I hope I’ve offered enough of a taste of Lemann’s lovely sentences to entice you. You might hear in those sentences crisp snap and mania for cadence reminiscent of works edited by the cult-editor-maniac-author Gordon Lish, who championed and edited Lemann’s novel at Knopf. Lemann’s gallows hilarity, heat and wreckage, and relentlessly charismatic prose also seem cousin to Barry Hannah (another Southerner who came into Lish’s orbit). Perhaps the most common point of comparison is Walker Percy, the obvious local patron saint, whose sharp comedy and moral weather occupy a similar space. (A “lovely nutty book about a lovely nutty girl,” Percy remarked of Lives of the Saints. He was apparently mentor and hero to Lemann.) I was also reminded very much of Whit Stillman’s first film Metropolitan while reading Saints, with its (Metropolitan’s) talky, mannered young elites moving through ritualized parties, cyphers afflicted with their own malaise and decay. Lemann’s novel reads like its inverse. Stillman’s world is winter, drawing rooms , self-conscious discourse; Lemann’s is summer and seersucker, where kindness is something you practice,  not a pose.

Maybe most of all, Saints reminded me of the intense yet nebulous cloud of wonderful memories I have of New Orleans, a city I’ve returned to again and again in my life at different ages — strange and alien and warm and comforting, sweltering, thumping, alive in its own rhythms and ecstasies, its joys accessible to anyone willing to attend, to taste, to listen. I loved Lives of the Saints; I finished it and insisted my wife read it immediately; she loved it too. I hope you will love it too. Very highly recommended.