Skip to main content

Nobody Writes Like Nancy Lemann

Photograph by David Wipf. Spanish moss, City Park, New Orleans, June 1958, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

 

Nancy Lemann’s work is deceptive in its meandering. She is thinking deeply even when it seems as if her thoughts are floating. Her laser powers slice into idiocy (and dice it) while they also beam sympathetically onto, as she would call it, the folly of the human condition. Her work evokes something old-fashioned in its manner and tone, and this proves to be a way she keeps herself from being subsumed in the clichés of modern culture even as she is examining it. But she is observing the human being of today. One of her passions is history, with particular attention to architectural preservation and travel. Though she is describing us, we feel she is looking at us from another time, through the lens of the ages.

Nobody writes like Nancy Lemann. You might recognize slivers of other writers within her work, writers whom she first revered: Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Hardwick, Barry Hannah, and her beloved mentor, Walker Percy.

The first time I read her work—in a writing workshop in college in New England, where I met her—I felt enveloped in a new atmosphere. I still remember one of her lines, just as I remember first reading Faulkner describe Caddy: “She smelled like trees.” This was Nancy: “You know you’re in the South when you’re wearing a yellow dress, and in the North when you’re wearing a black one.” I learned she was from New Orleans and that her last name was pronounced like the fruit. I thought she was merely channeling the atmospheric city of her youth. She was indeed channeling an atmospheric world, but it wasn’t only the world of New Orleans, it was the world of Nancy Lemann.

We got to know each other after college through correspondence. I had moved home after my mother’s death to be with my eight-year-old sister, and Nancy had moved back to New Orleans. We wrote letters often. I received glorious ten-page single-spaced letters, typed on thin rice paper. Many of these ended up being the first draft of what would become her first book—the iconic, unforgettably magical, and hilarious Lives of the Saints, a love letter to her hometown. She is now one of my oldest friends, so you may not believe me when I say she is also one of the funniest people I know. But it’s true.

From early on she has been both a worshipper and a dismisser. She is transcendent when describing her admiration for the noble and the flawed. She champions the underdog, giving special attention to the imperfect and the sensitive and the kind. She skewers with an extra slice the pretentious and the cruel.

Her own character is as beautifully stubborn and honest as her prose, and I’ve often seen on her face an expression of conflict between wanting to say something she knows to be true and feeling that it may cause offense. Fortunately, in her work, as mostly in life, the truth wins out. She has stuck to her unique sensibility and its power—the wit of repetition, the refusal to employ certain narrative conventions—and it has often cost her publications and publishers. Apparently they do not recognize comic literary genius when it appears before them. (Luckily, some editors do.)

 

Susan Minot is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, poet, and screenwriter.



from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/SxgNIuj
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Historical Future of Trans Literature

  Whatever happens against custom we say is against Nature, yet there is nothing whatsoever which is not in harmony with her. May Nature’s universal reason chase away that deluded ecstatic amazement which novelty brings to us.  —Michel de Montaigne If you were trying to get anywhere in the late thirteenth century, the Hereford Mappa Mundi would not have been particularly helpful; the map is rife with topographical omissions, compressions, and errors—the most egregious of which is perhaps the mislabeling of Africa as Europe and vice-versa. Of course, as any medievalist will tell you, mappa mundi were not intended for cartographic accuracy anyway. Rather, they were pictorial histories, encyclopedias of the world’s mythological and theological narratives, records of medical fact and fable. Notable places—Carthage, Rome, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Jericho—appeared, but their placement on the map emphasized their symbolic import, rather than their geographical specificity. Thus, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Year in Reading: Daniel Torday

I’ve been on leave from teaching this year, so it’s been a uniquely good 12 months of reading for me, a year when I’ve read for only one reason: fun. Now when I say fun … I’m a book nerd. So I tend to take on “reading projects.” The first was to work toward becoming a Joseph Conrad completist. I’m almost there. I warmed up with critic Maya Jasanoff ’s The Dawn Watch: Conrad in a Global World , which granted me permission to remember the capacious scope of his perspective, his humanistic genius. His masterwork was hard work, but Nostromo belongs on the shelf of both the most important and most difficult of the 20th century. The Secret Agent blew the top of my head off—it’s funny and deeply relevant to our moment, about a terrorist bombing gone horribly wrong. Under Western Eyes is all I got left. 2018 isn’t over yet. But then much fun came in reading whatever, whenever. That started with a heavy dose of Denis Johnson . The new posthumous collection of his short stories, The Lar...
Post a Comment
Read more