Nancy Lemann’s Lives of the Saints, recently reissued by NYRB Classics, came to me, as many books have, by way of the Jesuits. In the midst of my first teaching stint at Jesuit High School in New Orleans, where I, with my father and my grandfather and virtually every male member of my family of the last three generations, was educated, a young Jesuit, unable to take all of the books he had acquired over the course of his three-year regency at the school, entrusted a box of volumes to my care. Amid the Eliots and Balthasars, the Von Speyrs and Augustines, there emerged a slim old hardback, nattily—not to say gaudily—jacketed, bearing an unfamiliar name and a title which, to my ongoing discredit, struck me as singularly uninteresting. I looked for a moment at the pale woman with jewels in her dark hair, at the mustached gallant, at the palm tree leaning over the streetcar making its way down the bosky dark of St. Charles Avenue. Then I shelved palm, woman, and all and took my desultory path along the avenues of the Tradition. For some seven years, the book journeyed along in silence as my wife and I and our growing family moved from New Orleans to Arkansas, thence to Florida, and at last back to the Crescent City.

Not long after our return, as the books were once again unpacked and shelved, I became aware one evening of the presence of mirth in the living room. Peering in, I found my wife reading Lives of the Saints, laughing in a fashion reserved generally for the likes of Waugh, Toole, and Marx (Groucho, that is). My questions met with dancing images and phrases: napkinheads, bamboo groves, wino lunatics, intrigue and lust, everyone falling apart, the Hypostatic Union (ah, the Hypostatic Union).

When, shortly, my turn with Mrs. Lemann’s debut arrived, I found myself made at home in my ancestral city anew. If not so famously associated with literary New Orleans as Walker Percy or John Kennedy Toole (indeed, almost no one I ask has ever heard of Lives of the Saints), Lemann effortlessly outdoes either in advancing to the reader a vision of New Orleans which, though firmly situated in the 1980s, captures something of the eternity of the place, the heartbreaking beauty and fecklessness of a city doomed by history and geography and nonetheless redeemed, or at least capable of redemption, in virtue of its Catholic recognition of its own insufficiency. Percy’s New Orleans forever remains in some ways an outsider’s. Toole’s gilds with genius the cartoon quality of the town immediately recognizable to any who have lived here. But Lemann captures the city as those who have lived alongside it, generation by generation, have known it. Her characters go off to Point Clear at Labor Day. They are ill at ease with the Yankee industry that plants crops in the jungle garden. They meet with a Jesuit—one very like a classicist who once taught at my alma mater—at Antoine’s to study Greek. This is a book that truly understands New Orleans, and one that revels in practically every opportunity for mirth the city affords.

For all its madcap locality, Lives of the Saints nonetheless gently asserts its place in the broader canon by establishing itself as successor to the modernist American renaissance sparked by World War I. In particular, for all the family resemblance between her work and that of the more famous New Orleanian authors, Lemann’s book is most pointedly in conversation with The Great Gatsby. She signals this in the novel’s opening pages, when Louise Brown, our young narrator, recently returned from literary studies at a Northeastern university, remarks on the odd incommensurability of all those various but incontrovertibly American lives unfolding “far from that hub of the universe along the East Coast.” Here sounds an echo of that “ragged edge of the universe” which the Midwest had become for Nick Carraway on his return from the “delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War,” and Lemann is quick to follow Fitzgerald further by giving us a wedding party which, if less grandiose than Gatsby’s soirees, serves neatly to introduce the character of New Orleans as well as the cast who are to form Louise’s obsession—and our own—over the short and poignant course of the book.

With an English major’s ear and a local sympathy tempered by exposure to the eastern seaboard, Louise looks upon the spectacle of her city—through the tableau of the Collier family—with a bemusement teetering always between love and rage. Young liberal arts graduates will sympathize, of course, with some elements of her rage, as for instance those occasioned by the monotonous editing duties assigned to her by the partners in the law firm where she works. But Louise’s true frustration, rather more seriously, is in many senses akin to Nick Carraway’s. She would have the world “at a sort of moral attention,” but the world of the Colliers is one in which the wisdom of the philosophers and the poets cannot abide. “Everyone was too drunk. Everyone was unglued . . . All those people, all those catastrophes, not to mention breakdowns, at the wedding, made me lose the words of the poets. It was a Very Long Party.”