The arrival of a new writer into the pantheon of New Orleans’s native-born novelists, one who should have been there all along ... The Oyster Diaries works, on a surface level, because Lemann is full of shrewd observations about things like bumpy, storm-tossed landings at Louis Armstrong Airport, the naming of hurricanes and why Black women make the best judges ... Remorseful and melancholy, and it leaves a wide wake. It’s also a bit scattered and hectic, not Lemann’s best. Yet it’s wide awake. 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.
A singular stylist ... Sort of like if Charles Portis listened to a lot of Joni Mitchell ... Her tendency to repeat herself, the compulsion that gives her work such a musical quality and that has so confounded reviewers ('Why does she so persistently and jarringly use repetitions?' a critic wrote in the L.A. Times in 1987), is both her greatest tool and her greatest theme. Perhaps, she suggests, repetition could be seen less as a compulsion than as a mark of inimitable style ... Like a warm summer night or a third cocktail, Lemann lulls and envelops you. Like a breakdown, she lets you get carried away.
Distinctive, dreamy ... Images, events, and turns of phrase reoccur ... Has an air of running the tape back once more—this time, with the perspective gained by the passage of time and contact with a new generation ... It's about the differences between youth and age—about death, on the one hand, and disillusionment, on the other ... Another odd, wonderful novel.
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 ... May not stand among Lemann’s best work, but as with her use of styled repetition, it functions as a kind of sonar, an echolocation tethering the past to the present.
Composed of short, informal entries ... Lemann has a talent for bathos, as seen in many comic exchanges between Delery and her daughter ... Perhaps the style emerges from a kind of laziness. The Oyster Diaries is cobbled together from existing material ... Lemann makes no attempt to hide how much is borrowed ... This could be forgivable if The Oyster Diaries led us somewhere new. But Delery never fully lets go in her diary, hiding behind a defensive inanity that one suspects is partially Lemann’s own.
A throwback of sorts that points Lemann in intriguing new directions ... Meanders as it drifts along the narrative tides ... Though I sadly agree that New Orleans is still falling apart all these decades later, Lemann’s musings come off as Crescent City clichés ... In this book about generational changes, the writing can too often feel stuck in the past ... She still writes giddily enigmatic sentences that can be simultaneously funny and devastating. ... Although The Oyster Diaries does not rise to the level of Lemann’s two recently reprinted titles, the novel is not only a cause for celebration but a potential promise that there could be more new work forthcoming.
A self-aware excavation of the spirit in all its contradictions and relation to others ... Character is a key question for Delery. Emotions and the names we give them are not taken for granted, but are subjects worthy of deep study. What is remorse? What does it mean to forgive? ... The structure of the novel is loose and its mode discursive, as diaries tend to be. The questing writer turns over any topic that might illuminate her search for understanding ... She is entertaining company from the start, and becomes more revelatory and vulnerable with each chapter ... Ultimately, in the sum of its parts, both backwards and forward-looking, the novel is stealthily profound.
An easygoing and lovely, if inconsistent novel ... Despite the scattered structure, the novel offers an indelible ode to the struggling but vital city ... It's well worth taking the plunge.
