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.
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.
