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.
