The Lives of the Saints by Nancy Lemann

Fresh out of college in New England, a young woman returns home to New Orleans and is quickly pulled back into the city’s “wastrel-youth contingent” in this cult-classic novel of love and decadence, now with a new introduction.

Nancy Lemann’s voice is one of the most unusual in American fiction, unabashedly digressive, weirdly and wonderfully confiding, as witty as it is melancholy, an endless surprise. Hers is a voice born of and at odds with her native New Orleans, a voice that takes on and wonders at the ramshackle realities not just of the deep South but of America. Lives of the Saints, her first book, was a revelation of new talent. Reappearing here, several decades later, it is simply a revelation.

“Claude Collier made the world seem kind,” says Louise Brown, beginning a tale of Violent Love, Breakdowns, Moods, and Felonious Drunkenness that floats from one lush, green, sweltering New Orleans evening to another. When Louise returns home after four years of college in New England, she bemusedly finds herself reimmersed in New Orleans society’s “wastrel-youth contingent.” At the center of this gin-fueled hurricane is Claude Collier, rumpled, accident-prone, supremely sweet—and desperate. For Claude, Louise is his steadying focus; for Louise, Claude is the only man who can cause her heart to “break into a million pieces on the floor.”

REVIEWS

It’s been a long time since I read a novel whose language seemed so engagingly mannered or from which I wanted to quote so much . . . [Lives of the Saints is] a dark comedy, an alcohol-soaked idyll. And yet there is faith indeed, and trust.” —Michael Gorra, The New York Review of Books

"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

"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

PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback
Publisher: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 979-8896230281
Pages:  208