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 at a crossroads. 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, operatic wrath (felt most keenly toward bad houseguests), and remorse.

The Oyster Diaries, the latest novel by Nancy Lemann, is a funny and poignant portrayal of the vicissitudes of adulthood that sees the return, from her 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 engaging, and simply beloved of American writers at work today.