The Oyster Diaries
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the author of the cult classic Lives of the Saints, a diaristic novel of middle-aged reckoning that roves from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans, from court records to Don Giovanni, all of it riotously narrated by one of American fiction’s most singular voices.
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lemann takes readers back to the world of her 1985 cult classic Lives of the Saints with an easygoing and lovely, if inconsistent novel of late middle-age. Delery Anhalt, a native New Orleanian, lives now in Washington, D.C., with her family, but is regularly drawn back home. In New Orleans, she tends to her father, now marred to Delery's close friend Amelia, and reflects on his aging as well as her own. Heartbroken after she's blindsided by a betrayal, Delery comes to view herself as an innocent Don Quixote type, one who "embroider everything into vast ideals." While beautiful and deeply felt in their individual ways, the separate sections of Lemann's novel don't quite add up to a whole—the final section, set on an African safari with Delery's children and husband, feels tacked on to a more cohesive work centered on New Orleans, including Delery's present-day volunteer work there as a court-watcher in the backlogged criminal justice system. Despite the scattered structure, the novel offers an indelible ode to the struggling but vital city ("Things were different since Katrina. The scrappy quality. The gentility's still there, but its veneer chipped. Its shabbiness increased"). It's well worth taking the plunge.
