Inevitably, when a city shines in a movie or book, someone will say that it’s “almost like another character.” It’s a disappointing cliché because it fails on inspection: a city doesn’t have parents, it doesn’t eat breakfast or reminisce about its first love. The cliché feels true and clever the first time you hear it because the comparison begins to touch the edges of the mystery that is an individual’s relationship with a place of layered history, intense weather, or a particular buzz of human activity.
Better to recognize from the start that place can be as absorbing, as intrinsic to a story, as character. It’s exhilarating to come closer to understanding a city’s sensibility and how it reveals itself, how a city can feel motherly or fatherly or like an erratic lover, how a city can be so deeply rooted in a person’s way of being that they cannot be defined without its name being evoked. This is the city of New Orleans in Nancy Lemann’s The Oyster Diaries. Its heroine is Delery Anhalt, a native of the Big Easy who has made her life elsewhere but won’t ever shake the pull of its decaying gentility, twisted oaks, shocking disparity, and alcohol-fueled narrow escapes, and perhaps she doesn’t entirely want to. All other places and their folk will only ever be points of comparison.
Delery is in late middle age, grappling with her father’s decline, her two daughters leaving the nest, and sudden doubts in her marriage. Her “Oyster Diaries” are an attempt to understand a time of confusion, grief, and transformation. It’s a self-aware excavation of the spirit in all its contradictions and relation to others, but delicious rather than annoying because it’s the soul of a wiseass older woman in her wisdom, not a dramatic girl in her wastrel youth. Delery is self-deprecating but committed to the truth, “an odd mixture of astute plus I’m-at-a-Cocktail-Party.” She evokes the people in her life in a few sentences, but they become indelible. There is Curry Carter, a friend of her father’s, and arbiter of New Orleans high society: “The kings and dukes of Carnival always stopped to toast him at his house on the parade route, where he served duck sandwiches and champagne.” After Katrina, “society was still seen at parties along the Avenue uptown. Curry Carter in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank still attended every ball … The show must go on, was his attitude. To him it was a civic duty.” Then there’s her stepmother: “Amelia had the air of someone standing at the edge of an abyss over a vortex of catastrophe, waiting for the worst, as if she had seen the worst before, as if possessed of the most tragic knowledge that could be known. In the Southern town that she had never left, she had seen it all. She had never been anywhere, but she had seen it all. It does take a kind of genius to do that.”
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? Womanhood, the world of women’s noticing, crackling tensions, and expectations—imperceptible to most men—is not so much a theme to explore, but the origin of all other questions, made particularly uncomfortable by the sharpness and insight her daughters bring into Del’s life.
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, whether Kierkegaard (a very funny excursion into how annoying people can be), her in-laws or the life trajectory of her old flame, a “blue-eyed boy with the crooked smile” and hell in his essence. The novel is book-ended by two sections of dated journal entries, from 2021 and 2023, and in between are chapters of more structured storytelling. It’s a spiraling path to understanding. Delery’s voice and particular taxonomy of the elements of life become familiar (“wastrel youth” is one term, certain types of New Orleans mothers who drink vodka at the kitchen table in a black slip are another). She is entertaining company from the start, and becomes more revelatory and vulnerable with each chapter.
The last section takes a sudden swerve, into a diary account of a safari trip in Africa with her family. It’s like a door suddenly closed on intimacy as Delery is back to cocktail-party mode, prattling about her crush on the handsome tour guide and her older daughter’s denunciations of the patriarchy. It’s a disorienting ending to the quest; it lands more like an epilogue, though its abruptness does evoke the gaps that characterize diaries. Far from New Orleans, the questions are shallower and Del and her family become more like any other. But the fracture doesn’t detract from the allure of the whole. Ultimately, in the sum of its parts, both backwards and forward-looking, the novel is stealthily profound.
FICTION
The Oyster Diaries
By Nancy Lemann
New York Review Books
Published April 7, 2026
