The virtues and morals of this Southern hothouse are as lucid as those of Jane Austen's or George Eliot's provincial outposts.
—Krithika Varagur, The Paris Review
A lovely nutty book about a lovely nutty girl . . . Hilarious, haunting, poignant.
―Walker Percy
Spikily comic . . . This is how Blanche DuBois talked before the lampshade was torn away and life became lit with a naked bulb.
―James Wolcott, New York Review of Books
[Lemann's] women are frank, sardonic, bookish, self-absorbed and neurotic; they stew in their own juices. They deliver jokey shoves that sometimes land like real ones. The author channels their discontent and delivers slashing little thunderstorms of meaning. . . . [Lemann will] put you in mind of writers such as Lorrie Moore, Lydia Davis, Mary Robison and Fran Lebowitz, the four horsewomen of the anarchapocalypse.
—The New York Times
Think of Lives of the Saints as a long poem―a hysterically funny poem that is also beautifully written . . . Words are slung about recklessly, piled in staggering heaps, and what emerges from them is an almost hypnotic portrait of unforgettable people in a strange and magnificent city . . . Warming and endearing, brilliant.
―Anne Tyler, The New Republic
[Lives of the Saints is] funny but also has the condensed quality of a dream. It imparts a lingering sadness, one that follows you around for a few days after you’ve read it.
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
Nancy Lemann has taken the South away from the Sun Belters and returned it to a clutch of New Orleans natives who know how to give decadence a good name . . . If the Crescent City should find itself in the grip of a population explosion, they can blame Nancy Lemann for making her readers want to move there. I want to have a drink at that Lafayette Hotel.
―Florence King, Los Angeles Times Book Review
[Lives of the Saints] chronicles the decadent beauty of the South’s palmetto groves and antebellum mansions. It’s like a more humid Great Gatsby with the same piercing anthropological insights and doomed characters.
—Cat Zhang, The Cut
Like Edith Wharton tanked up on G&Ts, Lemann barters in gossip . . . Lives of the Saints, in its conception as well as its execution, deserves the adjective diluted by overuse in book reviews and blurbs: miraculous.
—Snowden Wright, Oxford American
Lauded for its auric descriptions of New Orleans, [Lives of the Saints] is also a penetrating study of Southern womanhood—specifically the self-destructive yen for romance and annihilation that can resist not only a formidable native intelligence but a worldly and progressive reeducation . . . It’s painful to be raised in a culture that prefers its women to look pretty and hate themselves, but Lemann’s narrators emerge from that pathological soup with a raw humility that makes them outstanding observers. They’re as humane as they are razor-sharp, and almost Zen-like in their ability to chronicle chaos within themselves, their cities, and the wider world. How fortunate for readers that Lemann is now reappearing to model those gifts.
—Abby Rosebrock, Book Post
A modern Fitzgerald is launched . . . Lemann's style can manage succinctness, wit, and pathos all in the same sentence.
―Cleveland Plain Dealer
Striking . . . richly rewarding . . . Reminiscent of the works of Eudora Welty and the late Tennessee Williams.
―Booklist
Brilliant . . . Party scenes worthy of Evelyn Waugh . . . and a very funny portrait of a people and place that haven't changed much since the Civil War.
―Kirkus Reviews
A tremendous first novel . . . with the mysterious subtlety of great writing.
―Vogue
The author's not inconsiderable feat is the creation of a world that is simultaneously wry, absurd and moving . . . A formidable debut performance from a novelist of exceptional gifts.
―Boston Globe
Witty, memorable, and original . . . Louise's tale of decency and self-destruction is poignant, serious, subtle. Lives of the Saints, in its flow of observations and feelings, is a superb portrait of a people whose day is not yet done.
―Vanity Fair
