{"id":162099,"date":"2022-10-18T10:00:32","date_gmt":"2022-10-18T14:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=162099"},"modified":"2022-10-18T11:00:52","modified_gmt":"2022-10-18T15:00:52","slug":"yodeling-into-a-canyon-a-conversation-with-nancy-lemann","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/10\/18\/yodeling-into-a-canyon-a-conversation-with-nancy-lemann\/","title":{"rendered":"Yodeling into a Canyon: A Conversation with Nancy Lemann"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Courtesy of Nancy Lemann.<\/p><\/div>\n

I first read Nancy Lemann\u2019s novel<\/em> 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?<\/em><\/p>\n

Lives of the Saints, first published in 1985,\u00a0is a novel that undermines our expectations of narrative: Lemann\u2019s 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 \u201cabout\u201d anything, it\u2019s 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 \u201cinto a million pieces on the floor.\u201d\u00a0<\/em>Lives of the Saints is peopled by eccentrics and doomed lovers and drunks and people who are always \u201cHaving a Breakdown.\u201d It\u2019s so rollickingly funny that in retrospect you might forget about its central tragedy, then reread it and get your heart broken all over again.<\/em><\/p>\n

Like\u00a0<\/em>Cassandra at the Wedding and<\/em> 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\u2019t remember how or when I picked up my copy, but much of the current generation of fandom can be traced to Kaitlin Phillips\u2019s 2018 recommendation<\/a> in\u00a0<\/em>SSENSE: \u201cRead this book in the bath.\u201d) After finishing it, I ordered every single one of Lemann\u2019s 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 particular angles of winter sunlight. One of her narrators even romanticizes the fall of the Ottoman Empire!\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Lemann\u2019s story<\/em> \u201cDiary of Remorse<\/a>,\u201d 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. You can read a chat the two of us had on the phone in September below. We agreed, among other things, that youth is angst.<\/em><\/p>\n

To celebrate Lemann’s remarkable literary career, we have also published a series of reflections on her work by the writers Susan Minot<\/a>, Krithika Varagur<\/a>, and James Wolcott<\/a> on our website. You can find, too, a short piece<\/a> by Lemann, on Saint Ignatius and <\/em>Tatler\u2014who else could do that?<\/em><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Why the diary form?<\/p>\n

LEMANN<\/p>\n

Around age fourteen, I started keeping a hideously copious diary because that\u2019s what I needed to do to deal with my angst and figure out the world. It was a hideous compulsion so eventually I thought, \u201cMaybe we can turn this into something productive instead of just being this hideous habit.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the case of my Paris Review<\/em> story, I went to Rigoletto<\/em>, I was reminded of Don Giovanni<\/em>, and then jolted by a time twenty years ago when I went to that opera after I first moved to Washington, D.C. I knew that I would be able to find an actual written record of it that would provide the details. I started writing at a time when there weren\u2019t computers and I was working on a typewriter. But after there were computers, you could press this button called F2 on a word processing program to search for a specific word. Now you just search \u201cDon Giovanni\u201d in the appropriate document and that\u2019s it, you find everything you\u2019re looking for.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

How do you think about the overlap between fiction and nonfiction?<\/p>\n

LEMANN<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a reporter at heart. It\u2019s so much easier to just chronicle everything. But then there\u2019s that whole thing where you\u2019re not supposed to care about hurting the people you\u2019re writing about. But I do care, especially the older I get. I have a fabulous novel in my drawer about a really juicy saga, but it just runs too close to reality. Lots of people would say, just do it anyway, but I can\u2019t live with it. So you have to disguise it somehow, which is incredibly hard.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Tell me a little bit about your first novel, Lives of the Saints<\/em>, and the time in your life when you were working on that book.<\/p>\n

LEMANN<\/p>\n

It took three months to write it and seven years to get it published because it\u2019s much harder for a certain kind of person to deal with business than it is to write a book It\u2019s the easiest thing to sit alone in your room and write, but what\u2019s hard is trying to sell yourself. Writers are shy. I was twenty-two and I had just finished college, and I had my first job, as a secretary at Tulane Law School in New Orleans. I was riding this tremendous wave of rage because my time was not my own. After I left that job I wrote the book, riding in on that wave of rage.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You seem to have a thing for societies in decline I\u2019m thinking of New York in The Fiery Pantheon<\/em>, or Washington D.C. in \u201cDiary of Remorse,\u201d and even the Ottoman Empire! Then of course, New Orleans in Lives of the Saints.<\/p>\n

LEMANN<\/p>\n

In Balzac, Paris is a character. New Orleans, God knows, is like that for me. My dear hero Walker Percy has talked about the genie-soul of a place. I love to try to figure that out. That\u2019s everything to me. And in New Orleans, there\u2019s always been the decline but not the fall. It\u2019s still happening. That whole world is still there. There\u2019s less and less of it, but it is still there. And it\u2019s just so quaint to me. It\u2019s like your first love: you just cannot forget it. I didn\u2019t know there was anything unusual about it until I went away to college up north. Then when I got back\u2014Jesus\u2026 It\u2019s like your ace in the pocket to be from somewhere so completely unique.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Do you go back often?<\/p>\n

LEMANN<\/p>\n

Excessively. Everything is there. When I\u2019m there, I\u2019m among generations, not just random people. There are people I knew when I was a kid, whose fathers knew my father, and whose grandfathers knew my grandfather. Standing on a street corner, I can see all these different layers of characters in history. There\u2019s so much more meaning there. It\u2019s like a fishbowl. The stage is smaller, magnifying the action.<\/p>\n

A sense of place is not enough for a story or a novel, though, and I always struggle to figure out what else to add to it. It\u2019s kind of a Jackson Pollock thing, where you just throw stuff out there, and see what makes sense and what sticks.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

In your story in the Review<\/em>, the diary provides some chronological structure, but there are still a lot of regressions and digressions. Your novels are rarely linear. How do you think about plot and structure?<\/p>\n

LEMANN<\/p>\n

Plot\u2014that\u2019s the hardest thing for me. I\u2019m always looking for ways to make it work. The reader needs a reason to turn the page. Sometimes personality or \u201cvoice\u201d can be enough, maybe, but that severely limits your audience. I have tried to do an intergenerational saga novel, but it was a failure. Colloquial yet terse is best. So maybe I can do it in a more shorthand way that would be less pretentious and boring.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Tell me about your influences. What do you read?<\/p>\n

LEMANN<\/p>\n

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<\/em> Proust but it\u2019s like, \u201cWhere was the editor?\u201d I can\u2019t read a whole two-page sentence about a dust mote. Shakespeare I love reading about but he writes in a different language and I don\u2019t speak that language. I will keep trying, though. Graham Greene is an old favorite. I\u2019m Jewish but I like these British Catholic writers. They\u2019re so reserved and in their restraint is a world of emotion. I find restraint to be extremely moving.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You often use catchphrases, like \u201cDoing Your Duty.\u201d They contain a lot and also elide things. There aren\u2019t really sex scenes in Lives of the Saints<\/em>\u2014people just \u201cgo to the bamboo grove.\u201d Those elisions are a form of restraint, and they\u2019re very funny sometimes.<\/p>\n

LEMANN<\/p>\n

When I look back on myself as a young woman, one of the things I find most striking and endearing is that she was inadvertently hilarious. People would find me hilarious and I wasn\u2019t \u00a0trying to be funny. What I like is tragicomedy. I think all-comedy-all-the-time gets really tedious, and you just want to throw the book across the room. Even someone like P. G. Wodehouse, it\u2019s enchanting at first but you want some depth or sorrow at some point. Evelyn Waugh is a master of that. Our Man In Havana<\/em> is another masterpiece of that.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

There is a lot of tragedy, too, in Lives of the Saints<\/em>\u2014the central tragedy, and then just the way the characters are feeling.<\/p>\n

LEMANN<\/p>\n

How old are you, Sophie?<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I am twenty-seven.<\/p>\n

LEMANN<\/p>\n

Okay, youth is so angst-filled. Youth is just all-angst-all-the-time.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

It is.<\/p>\n

LEMANN<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s honest.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Lives of the Saints<\/em> has had an interesting afterlife\u2014it\u2019s constantly passed around between young women.<\/p>\n

LEMANN<\/p>\n

It\u2019s so odd to have you paying me mind. Usually writing is like yodeling into a canyon. You have to make your peace with it or else you won\u2019t go on. There are all kinds of ego problems going on with writers. It\u2019s strange when they pay you mind, then it\u2019s strange when they don\u2019t. But if you young people like it, then you might want to work on trying to get it back in print.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sophie Haigney is the web editor of<\/em> The Paris Review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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