"Where Olmsted County News Comes First"

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Because Mardi Gras season is upon us, even here in the uncarnivaled North, I see purple and gold and green in a new light. As a New Orleanian, I have made my house into such a flag for just such a season as this. Around this time, I seek out Louisiana literature to get me in the proper state of mind. What I review here is not an exemplar of Louisiana patriotism, it is the voice of a disaffected ex. For a more proper New Orleans read for the holiday, I suggest Codrescu’s book New Orleans, Mon Amour.

In The Ritz of the Bayou it is not apparent that Nancy Lemann is a Louisiana native as she claims to be. In fact, it is a challenge to pin down, ever, who Nancy Lemann, in fact, is—as narrator and/or as fellow human being. Without lucid chronology, without rhythm, what Nancy Lemann delivers is a litany of disjointed observations and befuddled personal musings, perhaps collage, around the general topic of the trial of Edwin Edwards, governor of Louisiana, in 1984. Had there been a musicality to her meter, or had she been able to smooth the lurching quality of the non-narrative by eliminating half of the line breaks, the Ritz would have seemed less put on.

At times, Lemann is trying very hard to be cute. Or incredulous. Or patronizing. This she tries to accomplish with perseveration, or as she terms it “litanies” of her themes. “The truth, in the end, I think, is likely to be found in a courtroom, but so is a great deal of ‘human frailty.’ There is a lot of human frailty floating around” (8). It is unclear why the first “human frailty” is set within quotation marks. She does not use them again. Perhaps she thinks she has coined a charming or apt phrase? Because she continues, “There is so much human frailty floating around that it is a dramatic thing to see, for better and for worse, and I have to say that there, among the human frailty, I found something I had ceased to expect, and it was written in dramatic script, when otherwise, when it was over, life was written in small print. It is not that I advocate human frailty.” Lehmann is voicey, her pace and rhythm breathless and rife with catchphrases which I’m not sure I quite catch.

Too much repetition can be obnoxious. Within ten pages of chapter two Lemann uses “jovial” and “jolly” twelve times to describe the defense lawyers and the Governor. Chapter five: “The man from the train loves problems. There is nothing he loves more than problems. He has a lot of problems, but so do I. ‘You like problems?’ I said to him” (72). “A certain someone who shall remain nameless, because he wishes it that way, had organized a sort of social club which was meant to be veiled in secrecy. It was related to Mardi Gras, and such things are veiled in secrecy. A certain someone who shall remain nameless appointed me to a secret committee which was so secret that you could barely tell if you were on the committee” (77). From chapter four, “Brazilian contortionists writhed in the nightclubs, and concessionaires hurting from the general low attendance were losing their shirts. Owners of nightclubs with Brazilian contortionists were losing their shirts” (46) and then she actually repeats the phrase with slightly reordered syntax once again. The humorously patronizing voiceyness doesn’t work because that which she is trying to make seem ridiculous accomplished that work on its own. We get it—it’s ridiculous, but, most readers with half a clue would expect the ridiculous in New Orleans. Perhaps Lemann wanted to be more ridiculous herself than the ridiculous itself. The voice only works to distance us from her, to caricaturize her as a narrator with an attitude. I find myself off put by it.

There is little or no evidence in the book as to why Lemann cares about this book she writes, also distancing and off-putting. She writes as one flippantly completing an assignment, not as one invested in her topic. Other than a girl who can turn a head and get a date here or there, or the Grim Reaper among the courtroom joviality, amid other stray facts, Nancy Lemann doesn’t let the reader know who she is, an effect, perhaps she suffered to learn in New Orleans with its ethic of masque and mirage.

Readers who have genuine interest in Louisiana history and Edwin Edwards’ trial cannot trust Lemann to deliver even the bare story of the fascinating affair because her nonsense and literary coyness obscures the narrative. When she accuses the prosecution of leading off with an “ineloquent ramble with lurid sidelines” (40) she does not intuit that perhaps she in her ineloquent ramblings is guilty of the same critique. One wonders after the third or fourth perseveration device if Lemann is mocking the diction of the jolly Louisiana politician? Perhaps she means to disorient the reader with her lurching line breaks, just as she perhaps felt disoriented by the lackadaisical timeline kept by the court with its delays and undeserved breaks. Lemann may have intended, as narrator, to assume the posture of the Louisiana politician: “familiar and cynical and jocular” (19).

If this is not what she meant to do, it is what she did. And knowing that this story issues from a woman writing her home—her home state, that is—Lemann does not come across as someone who has much nostalgia. Her voice is that of a bitchy tourist picking at the ridiculous joviality, the harebrained born-again Christians, the existential commentaries from courtroom philosophers who order their world by grading oysters—she is critical of everything like someone who has no stake. Not nothing at stake, but no stake. Unbound, her pen flaps like a rude Yankee mouth, like a blank flag.