The Novelist Nancy Lemann’s New Orleans Return
A love-it-or-leave-it feature of Nancy Lemann’s distinctive, dreamy style is that she often repeats herself. Images, events, and turns of phrase reoccur both within and across her five novels and even, to a lesser extent, in her nonfiction. The people in her books are always “falling apart”; their hearts are often “in a million pieces on the floor.” Her narrators—usually women from New Orleans—have a reverence for older traditions, including baseball, which represents “a chance to go forth with the heroes,” and for men in seersucker suits who have outdated affectations, like reading ancient Greek and eating oysters at lunch. Several of these women have soft spots for the same “blue-eyed boy with the crooked smile” (who has a drinking problem), and they tend to indulge in what could be called negative self-talk (they chide themselves for being “idiotic” or “lamebrained”). In the introduction to a new reissue of Lemann’s 1985 cult-classic debut novel, Lives of the Saints, the British writer Geoff Dyer makes note of the “hypnotic repetition” that gives the book its rhythm …
