The Oyster Diaries

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. 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, operativ 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 egaging, and simply beloved of American writers at work today."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

"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 WeeklyNancy Lemann was born in New Orleans and is the author of Lives of the Saints, The Ritz of the Bayou, and Malaise, among other books.