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The Oyster Diaries

The Oyster Diaries

by Nancy Lemann

$17.95
$17.95
American Literature Available as E-Book Fiction
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Delery Anhalt—middle-aged and prone, like Don Quixote, to “embroidering everything into vast ideals” but incapable (like Desdemona?) of identifying the Shakespearean villains in her life—finds herself at a crossroads. Her father and his peers, the old guard of New Orleans, are entering their twilight years. Her daughters are stepping decisively into adulthood. Delery, caught between the demands of the generations, takes stock of herself in a series of diaries that move freely between present and past: from the waning days of Covid and her employment as a virtual court monitor of criminal cases in New Orleans to the travails of daily life in Washington, DC. Throughout, she revisits—with frankness, with fury, with not a few qualms and some further thoughts—what she calls her lions at the gate: her insecurity, ego, annoyance, operatic wrath (felt most keenly toward bad houseguests), and remorse.

The Oyster Diaries, the latest novel by the incomparable Nancy Lemann, is a funny and poignant portrayal of the vicissitudes of adulthood that sees the return, from her legendary debut, Lives of the Saints, of the heroic wastrel Claude Collier. This is an exuberant, indignant, insightful performance, and an irresistible addition to the books that have made Lemann one of the keenest, most engaging, and simply beloved of American writers at work today.

Additional Book Information

Series: New York Review Books
ISBN: 9798896230328
Pages: 240
Publication Date:

Praise

[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

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... Though she is describing us, we feel she is looking at us from another time, through the lens of the ages.
—Susan Minot

The Oyster Diaries is remorseful and melancholy, and it leaves a wide wake . . . It’s an epic of disgruntlement that’s in touch with life’s little moments of grace. It reminds you that Lemann isn’t just a shining New Orleans writer. She’s a shining American one.
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

Making sense of the vicissitudes and mysteries of middle age with wit, intelligence, and a firm grounding in the spirit of New Orleans . . . This book is so funny that its poignant, elegiac side kind of sneaks up on you.
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

In The Oyster Diaries, we get to witness a rare event, an author dealing with her youthful limitations as a writer through the limitations that come with age . . . the sharpest and most astute observations, anecdotes, and impressions in The Oyster Diaries corroborate Joan Didion’s reason for keeping a notebook, also known as a diary: 'I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not..'
—Snowden Wright, Oxford American

Lemann takes readers back to the world of her 1985 cult classic Lives of the Saints with an easygoing and lovely . . . novel of late middle-age . . . the novel offers an indelible ode to the struggling but vital city [of New Orleans] . . . It’s well worth taking the plunge.
—Publishers Weekly

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