Lives of the Saints

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, almost fifty years 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 re-immersed in New Orleans society’s “wastrel-youth contingent.” At the center of this gin-fuelled 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.”

By turns elegiac and eccentric, inscribing the South’s hallmarks of defeat and refuge in a group of people as intense and adrift as one could encounter, Lives of the Saints is as tender and moving now as ever.