“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks,” Flannery O’Connor once remarked, “I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.” By “freaks,” she meant the ruined, lost, or dissolute—the ”maimed souls,” as she called them, who skulked through Southern fiction, including her own, and disturbed readers in search of more uplifting fare. It took a Southerner to recognize a freak, O’Connor speculated, because Southerners were particularly prone to a kind of generalized spiritual anxiety. Even nonbelievers in the South worried for their souls and took notice of those who seemed to be imperiling their own. (“While the South is hardly Christ-centered,” she quipped, “it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”) What Southern writers understood was that there was little separating them from the freaks they conjured on the page—that they shared the same decaying world, and had also inherited its immoral logic, its violent and contradictory character. Freaks could be tragic heroes, more compelling, and more human, for their sins; freaks could tell us something about ourselves. 

The freak at the heart of Nancy Lemann’s novel Lives of the Saints is Claude Collier of New Orleans: 27, well-to-do, with “an extremely sociable, high-hearted temperament” and a martyr-like disposition. (He “would give an ant a funeral,” one character remarks.) Not a freak, then, in the mode of O’Connor, who would never have described even her most appealing characters as “gentle and uncorrupt.” But this manic gallantry belies a fundamental darkness in Claude, according to Lemann’s narrator, Louise Brown, his longtime friend and sometime girlfriend. He has the “levity of the Southern,” she reflects, “being actually desperation masked by levity.” He is also “aimless at his core,” and given to the less-than-salutary pastimes of gambling, procrastination, and what could generously be called binge drinking. So Claude loiters in the muggy gardens and seamy clubs of his native city, devoted only to the profession of socializing, assiduously avoiding himself. Louise assures us that she doesn’t “respect idleness in a man, of course,” and yet she can’t help but love Claude fiercely. He is “just Going Through a Phase,” she avers: and who among us hasn’t made such an excuse for a troublesome lover? 

Lives of the Saints, Lemann’s debut novel, was first published in 1985—long before the term “toxic situationship” had entered our vernacular—and was reissued this month by New York Review Books as part of a recent wave of renewed interest in Lemann’s work. Most of her five novels (one of which was published this month, also by NYRB) are set at least partially in New Orleans, and characters from Lives of the Saints, including Louise and Claude, reappear in some of them. These are fairly plotless novels, and devilishly witty ones—Lemann is a crack hand at a tossed-off aphorism—yet too ruminative and elegiac to be classified strictly as comedies. Many of their narrators share certain biographical details with Lemann: Louisianan women with literary talents who have spent time in the North (Louise has recently returned from an unnamed college in the East, where she studied English and experienced “the elations of poetry”; Lemann herself went to Brown and now lives in Maryland). 

But while it’s tempting to group Lemann with expounders of the pseudo-autobiographical style lately known as autofiction, her highly social novels of manners resist that designation, too. They are primarily interested in the lives and rituals of other people, especially the rudderless freaks who number among the Southern upper crust. (As Louise puts it, in one of those lancing aphorisms: “Nuts made life worth living.”) This might explain why much of Lemann’s work has fallen out of print, and why mainstream publishers turned her down, to their detriment, after her early success in the 80s and 90s. Her fiction is arch, slippery, and slightly old-fashioned (there’s something Dickensian, for instance, about the errant capitalization-for-emphasis in Lives of the Saints). It is also honest—sometimes to a discomfiting extent—about the South’s flaws and attractions, its attendant crises of faith. Lemann’s novels may have been written off as minor dispatches from a region whose violent history and troubled legacy many Americans would prefer not to confront at all: maybe we’d have been better off without it, goes the snide refrain.

 “While it’s tempting to group Lemann with expounders of the pseudo-autobiographical style lately known as autofiction, her highly social novels of manners resist that designation, too. They are primarily interested in the lives and rituals of other people, especially the rudderless freaks who number among the Southern upper crust.”

But for Louise Brown, the South is the center of the universe. She has just chosen to cut short a post-college sojourn to New York City, whose “rectitude and high ideals” she found stifling. Back in New Orleans, she takes a proofreading gig at a drowsy law firm—staffed with attorneys who spend most of their time duck-hunting or listening to opera—and contents herself with a more languid pace of life. Part of the draw is Claude and his family, who exemplify the faded grandeur of the white Southern elite, its louche and spendthrift ways. They are “the last family in America to eat formal dinners served by a butler wearing a tuxedo,” she notes, not disapprovingly. The Colliers live off of an oil fortune and ostensibly manage two decrepit sugar plantations, “ruined” since the end of the Civil War. But mostly they tipple at parties and waft about their enormous and “violently pretty house,” located “on the corner of Indulgence and Religion, in the Lower Garden District.” These are people who no longer have much to believe in—people for whom religion is a charming street name, and whose cherished customs and financial stability, forged in the time of slavery, are fast disappearing. And yet they have a disciple of their own in Louise, who has known the Colliers since she was a child and fervently believes in their goodness. They are the unlikely “Saints” at the center of her hagiography, as Lemann establishes none too subtly: “Saint” is the nickname of Claude’s five-year-old brother, the namesake of his father, Saint Louis Collier. 

Saint is also the unfortunate casualty of the only real plot point in the novel, which occurs a few dozen pages in. Like a miniature Icarus, he sets out in an “intrepid, reckless way” to climb the Colliers’ balcony and peer at their garden in the middle of the night. Must I tell you what happens next? His death doesn’t radically alter his family so much as it cements them in place, preventing them from ever moving forward in life. The priggish Mrs. Collier distracts herself with housekeeping and sinks into “lethargy.” Her husband, an eccentric lawyer, develops an obsession with Greek antiquity and, coincidentally enough, hagiography—searching for refuge in the past, and in the useless, pedantic act of accumulating knowledge. (“His interest in lives of the saints,” Louise notes, “was not religious.”) And then there is Claude, who attempts an escape to the Northeast to seek some kind of fortune, but only falls back into his usual vagabond routines: nights in “tawdry motels”; afternoons spent making lists of “THINGS I GOTTA DO TODAY”; broken-up calls to Louise from “funny-seeming parties with people screaming in the background.” Inevitably, he returns to New Orleans in a state of agitation, and promptly dedicates himself to a horse-race betting scheme of dubious legality. 

What keeps Louise tethered to these people in the midst of their “Nervous Breakdowns,” their self-absorption and utter passivity? She insists, with the dauntless conviction of an evangelist, that the Colliers are wise, noble, and generous, but one gets the feeling that they don’t expend much thought on her—that she might not rank much higher than the anonymous maids and waiters (many of them Black) who facilitate their dinners and gin-swigging, and bear witness to their ruin. Claude is apparently her beau, but he has a constitutional weakness for philandering, among other symptoms of what might be deemed “anxious avoidance” today. (At one point, he declares himself incapable of loving “just one person”; the phrase girl, dump him kept flashing through my mind.) But the Colliers also stand in for qualities that Louise associates with the South: a pernicious commitment to hierarchy, a certain sense of indolence, and a humility brought about by defeat. Theirs is a broken and backwards world, she knows, but it is also one in which failure is tolerated and even expected. In New Orleans, with its freakish array of “wino lunatics, dissipated businessmen, crooked politicians, demented young lawyers, debutantes, alcoholics, and sleazy men,” Louise’s own uncertainty about her life is no more concerning than a passing rainstorm on a humid day. Here, in the “fateful green garden” of her youth, she is allowed to surrender her ambition and give herself up to the pleasure of dissipation. 

It’s a deal she’s all too eager to strike, even if she grasps the perils of hitching her destiny to a “desperate character” such as Claude. By the novel’s end, her beloved has been dragged off to jail, returning long enough to offer cryptic reassurances before retreating into the “gaudy crowd of humanity” on Bourbon Street and “disappear[ing] for years.” When he and Louise rematerialize in Lemann’s subsequent novels, they have been mysteriously reunited, and their lot has only worsened. In Sportsman’s Paradise (1992), told from the point of view of one of Claude’s cousins, Storey Collier, they are in their late thirties and unhappily married; alcoholism and affairs (his, naturally) are vaguely alluded to. Claude crops up in a psych ward, while Louise hovers in the background, nameless and distraught: “Claude Collier’s wife was what is called long-suffering,” Storey explains. And in Lemann’s new novel, The Oyster Diaries—narrated by a friend of the couple’s from their “wastrel youth”—we learn that Louise eventually left Claude, and, it’s implied, New Orleans, taking all of their children “except for the handicapped son.” This is “shocking” to the narrator, but it shouldn’t surprise anyone who has tracked Louise’s story across Lemann’s fictional universe. Her departure must be a delayed reaction to the Colliers’ inertia, a rejection of their aimless and ineffectual ways—and yet her abdication of responsibility marks her as wayward, a freak, just like them. 

Clearly, this is a less than happy resolution for one of Lemann’s most captivating characters, and the one who set her literary career in motion in the first place. (O’Connor, who scorned a pleasant dénouement, would have been proud.) But it by no means diminishes the unique diversions and satisfactions that come from spending time in her vision of the South, in all its fraught splendor, among her community of crack-ups. It’s a blessing, too, that her return to the public eye occasioned an end to Louise and Claude’s love story at all. Theirs is a tragedy that feels at once particular and wholly familiar, even fable-like; Lemann’s style is idiosyncratic but never remote. One wants to linger in her sugarcane groves and columned mansions, and to follow the wretched souls and would-be saints who haunt them, damned as they may be.