The Oyster Diaries

“[Lemann’s] women are frank, sardonic, bookish, self-absorbed and neurotic; they stew in their own juices. They deliver jokey shoves that sometimes land like real ones. The author channels their discontent and delivers slashing little thunderstorms of meaning. . . . [Lemann will] put you in mind of writers such as Lorrie Moore, Lydia Davis, Mary Robison and Fran Lebowitz, the four horsewomen of the anarchapocalypse.” —The New York Times

“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

“In The Oyster Diaries, we get to witness a rare event, an author dealing with her youthful limitations as a writer through the limitations that come with age . . . the sharpest and most astute observations, anecdotes, and impressions in The Oyster Diaries corroborate Joan Didion’s reason for keeping a notebook, also known as a diary: ‘I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.'”
—Snowden Wright, Oxford American

“A fruitfully vexed, self-aware spirituality—comprising strains of American puritanism, Jewish-Catholic guilt, Southern self-loathing, and female self-flagellation—animates [The Oyster Diaries] from page one. Relating to this inheritance, and not yet having seen it so precisely rendered in fiction before, I could not put the book down.” —Abby Rosebrock, Book Post

“The Oyster Diaries is remorseful and melancholy, and it leaves a wide wake . . . It’s an epic of disgruntlement that’s in touch with life’s little moments of grace. It reminds you that Lemann isn’t just a shining New Orleans writer. She’s a shining American one.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Making sense of the vicissitudes and mysteries of middle age with wit, intelligence, and a firm grounding in the spirit of New Orleans . . . This book is so funny that its poignant, elegiac side kind of sneaks up on you.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“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 Weekly