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 Rejection Plot

Print from Trouble , by Bruce Charlesworth, a portfolio which appeared in The Paris Review in the magazine’s Fall 1985 issue. Rejection may be universal, but as plots go, it’s second-rate—all buildup and no closure, an inherent letdown. Stories are usually defined by progress: the development of events toward their conclusions, characters toward their fates, questions toward understanding, themes toward fulfillment. But unlike marriage, murder, and war, rejection offers no obstacles to surmount, milestones to mark, rituals to observe. If a plot point is a shift in a state of affairs—the meeting of a long-lost twin, the fateful red stain on a handkerchief—rejection offers none; what was true before is true after. Nothing happens, no one is materially harmed, and the rejected party loses nothing but the cherished prospect of something they never had to begin with. If the romance plot sets up an enticing question—Will they or won’t they? — the rejection plot spoils everything upfront:...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .   In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...
Post a Comment
Read more