Nancy Lemann's "Lives of the Saints"
Also: A history of English marsh making, the life of medieval minstrels, too much Kafka, and more.
I recently started reading Nancy Lemann’s 1985 novel Lives of the Saints, which is set in New Orleans, and it’s a pleasure so far. (I have a long list of novels I want to read this summer, including Lee Oser’s Old Enemies and Eugene Vodolazkin’s A History of the Island, but it is depressing to think about how to make time to get to them all.)
Lemann does have one quirk that is mildly annoying. She uses repetition to give her prose a certain rhythm, which is fine if done sparingly, but she tends to overdo it, particularly at the beginning of the novel. “Everyone had breakdowns at this wedding,” she writes:
Including the bride and groom. Especially the bride and groom. Crowded parties like at the Stewarts’ often can be known to Bring on the Breakdowns. Especially if the Stewarts are the hosts.
I went into this wedding armed with a philosophical acquiescence I had learned from the poets, but I found in society their principles did not hold weight. Everyone was too drunk. Everyone was unglued.
The repetition of “bride and groom” and the redundancy of “drunk” and “unglued” are clearly intended to imitate how people think and talk (in circles) and to create a pleasing self-similarity. It’s perfectly fine in moderation, but Lemann does this sort of thing over and over again. She uses the word “breakdown” as a refrain and repeats characters full names so much that it begins to grate.
There is a fine line between pleasing artistry and mere confection, which is made more difficult for writers by the fact that readers’ appreciation (or tolerance) of certain aspects of style varies wildly. I have encountered the use of chiasmus so frequently that my tolerance of it is probably unfairly low. (Chiasmus is an inverted parallelism—i.e., “Men need not trouble to alter conditions, conditions will soon alter men.”) So, I won’t be too hard on Lemann for her repetition.
What she does well in Lives of the Saints—or, at least, what I have enjoyed the most about the novel so far—is her pithy characterizations. Mr. Stewart, for example, “was a law professor and had a tendency to lecture on all occasions”:
He often aired his private views for the benefit of large groups. He took particular relish in quotation. I could hear him quoting from the Bible: “Woman, thou shoulds’t ever go in sackcloth and mourning, thy eyes filled with tears. Thou has brought about the ruin of mankind.”
He was looking remorsefully into the eyes of some poor unsuspecting woman standing next to him to gain a histrionic effect. As though off in a reverie, he turned dazed eyes on his youngest son.
“Peter, I’ll tell you what Jeb Stuart used to say.” Mr. Stewart looked raptly off into space. “‘All I ask of fate is that I may be killed leading a cavalry charge.’”
Mr. Stewart’s blond wife “could spend an entire afternoon talking about what hat she wore when she was fifteen . . . minute details of clothing recalled to her the Mystery of Life . . . ”
A proper Mr. Collier, wearing a wrinkled and yellowed seersucker suit, finds himself in conversation with Mrs. Sully Legendre, who “was married to a famous playboy” and had “a jazzy way of talking”:
It seemed inappropriate, her saying to the dignified Mr. Collier, “Baby, just lemme tell you this . . . ” and then she would make some jazzy, cynical remark. She would look at him inquiringly with her crestfallen face, but Mr. Collier was not forthcoming on the subject. He would never say anything bad about anyone.
Mrs. Legendre continued in a crestfallen vein, delivering some cynical maxims pertaining to marriage. Mr. Collier nodded stiffly, coughed, pretended to be thinking it over. He puffed on his cigar. He looked at her gently.
“Never marry a man with a weak chin, fella,” she concluded grimly.
“Quite right,” said Mr. Collier mildly.
The novel is full of such pitch-perfect scenes, which are, at once, so recognizably Southern and farcical.
In other news, it has just been discovered that the plague first came to Britain 4,000 years ago: “Yersinia pestis is best known for its role in the Black Death, which killed a third of Europe’s population in the 14th century. In 2021, the earliest known plague strain was found in a skull buried in Latvia 5000 years ago. Pooja Swali at the Francis Crick Institute in London and her colleagues tested the teeth of 30 individuals found in a mass burial site at Charterhouse Warren Farm in Somerset, as well as teeth from four individuals buried at Levens Park ring cairn in Cumbria, UK. The teeth of two children from Charterhouse and one woman from Levens Park tested positive for the DNA of Y. pestis. This is the first evidence that the plague bacterium had spread to Britain from continental Europe in the Bronze Age.”
A history of English marsh draining: “The early migrants to England from Friesland, Jutland and Belgium were diggers. Wanting to farm the boggy English land, they drained and embanked the marsh to make it a field. In his landmark book Lives of the Engineers, Samuel Smiles called them “agricultural colonists”, comparing them to the people then migrating to Australia and New Zealand to settle the land. This began Britain’s long history as a nation of drainage engineers.”
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