Nancy Lemann's Impossible Romances - gmagnuson@gmail.com - Gmail

Nancy Lemann's Impossible Romances - gmagnuson@gmail.com - Gmail: Google's approach to email Nancy Lemann's Impossible Romances mailchi.mp/theparisreview.org/nancy-leman-conversation View this email in your browser Photograph by Sophie Haigney. I first read Nancy Lemann’s novel Lives of the Saints in one sitting, on an airplane. I was spellbound, moved, and deeply charmed. Who was this woman? Why had I never read her before? How was she capable of articulating an experience of youth that, in all its wastrelness, was exactly like my own despite being completely different? Lives of the Saints, first published in 1985, is a novel that undermines our expectations of narrative: Lemann’s fiction does not flow in the normal direction but loops in circles and rides along on digressions that resemble the chaos of real life. The book is remarkable for its restraint and for its lush detail. If it can be said to be “about” anything, it’s about a young woman named Louise who has returned to New Orleans from college in the North; she finds herself thrust back into the richly entangled social world of her childhood, back among the people she has always known, including Claude Collier, the only man who can break her heart “into a million pieces on the floor.” Lives of the Saints is peopled by eccentrics and doomed lovers and drunks and people who are always “Having a Breakdown.” It’s so rollickingly funny that in retrospect you might forget about its central tragedy, then reread it and get your heart broken all over again. Like Cassandra at the Wedding and The Transit of Venus, Lives of the Saints has had a formidable afterlife, sustained not by support from the literary publicity machine but by a network of recommendations from die-hard fans, of which I am now one. (I don’t remember how or when I picked up my copy, but much of the current generation of fandom can be traced to Kaitlin Phillips’s 2018 recommendation in SSENSE: “Read this book in the bath.”) After finishing it, I ordered every single one of Lemann’s novels, and read them more or less back-to-back. It felt like absorbing a consciousness that suddenly made everything make sense. I, too, have Had a Breakdown. I, too, romanticize the impossible, the decaying, and the societies that have lapsed in a long slow deserved decline; I can be moved to tears by things like wisteria and angles of winter sunlight. One of her narrators even romanticizes the fall of the Ottoman Empire! Lemann’s “Diary of Remorse,” in our Fall issue, has the same madcap, digressive quality that defines her novels as well as the same blend of humor, pain, and beauty. To celebrate her remarkable literary career, we have published a series of reflections on her work by the writers Susan Minot, Krithika Varagur, and James Wolcott on our website. You can also find a short piece by Lemann, on Saint Ignatius and Tatler—who else could do that?—and read a chat the two of us had on the phone in September. We agreed, among other things, that youth is angst. —Sophie Haigney, web editor PROSE Diary of Remorse Nancy Lemann I was plagued by remorse, but my remorse seemed inspired by insignificant dumb things—things not really worthy of bona fide remorse. That didn’t make it any less painful or plague-worthy, as I was still riddled with disgrace on a minute-by-minute basis, so I decided to conduct a scientific study to analyze the cause(s). From issue no. 241 (Fall 2022) CONVERSATIONS Yodeling into a Canyon: A Conversation with Nancy Lemann Sophie Haigney INTERVIEWER Tell me about your influences. What do you read? LEMANN Evelyn Waugh has always been a favorite. I love Persephone Books, a publisher that rescues out-of-print books, mostly by British ladies from around the world wars. Nabokov. Tolstoy is very accessible. Some of the biggies are too hard for me. I love reading about Proust but it’s like, “Where was the editor?” I can’t read a whole two-page sentence about a dust mote. From the Daily (October 18, 2022) REREADING Nobody Writes Like Nancy Lemann Susan Minot 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. From the Daily (September 22, 2022) Copyright © 2022 The Paris Review, All rights reserved. Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list. Email Marketing Powered by Mailchimp Powered by PrintFriendly.com Pr