Two truths about writers:
1. No writer is for everyone. But some writers are for you.
2. Most authors fall into obscurity, to the extent that they ever emerged from it in the first place. To paraphrase Keynes: In the long run we are all out of print.

So when an author who is very much for you but has been lingering in obscurity is Having a Moment, you owe it to your appreciation of them to spread the word as widely as possible.

That’s why this commonplace book issue of This, Not That consists solely of quotes from Nancy Lemann, an American novelist of modest output. Over the course of the past forty-one years she has published five novels, as well as one book of nonfiction that, in its sensibility and voice, might as well be a novel. Nearly all fell out of print long ago.

This month, however, NYRB Classics brought back Lemann’s 1985 debut novel, The Lives of the Saints, as well as her first new novel in almost twenty-five years, The Oyster Diaries. In addition, Hub City Press republished her sole work of nonfiction, The Ritz of the Bayou: The New Orleans Adventures of a Young Novelist Covering the Trials of the Governor of Louisiana, with Digressions on Smoldering Nightclubs, Jazz-Crazed Bars, and Other Aspects of Life in the Tropic Zone. (That subtitle may be all you need to know to determine which sentence in my first point up top applies to you re: Lemann.) The reissues are getting attention, with the New York Times, New Yorker, and the Atlantic all covering the books’ return.

Lemann deserves it. From the first page of her first book, she had a distinctive voice and perspective. She writes of the white, aristocratic American South deep into its decline, a subject of no inherent appeal to me that, in Lemann’s hands, becomes a source of poignant beauty, loss, and gentle, loving amusement. Her subjects are eccentrics and love, usually intertwined. Her favorite words are decrepit, decayed, demented. She loves wastrels, ne’erdowells, drunks, cranks, failures. People in her books are always Falling Apart or Going to Pieces. Her eccentrics call to mind Charles Portis; her habit of repeating words and phrases Thomas Bernhard. But she has a streak of romanticism stronger than what’s found in Portis, and her repetition, too, feels driven by love, rather than by the compulsion that propels Bernhard. Oh, and she’s funny.

I’ll now remind you of truth number one up at the top, and turn you loose to determine for yourself whether Nancy Lemann is a writer for you. If so: You can order the in-print books at this link. (I’ve decided to start linking to a different bookstore I like each issue, starting with Downbound Books in Cincinnati, because I know at least one member of their staff is a Lemann fan.)

It was one of those mornings when your first impulse is to cry.
—Lives of the Saints

It was actually a kind of consolation for mortality, that they seemed so world-weary and disgusted.
—Malaise

There is so much human frailty floating around that it is a dramatic thing to see. I had never seen so much of it, all at once, and it was a sort of breathtaking spectacle.
—The Ritz of the Bayou

“Is Dad coming soon?” said Al.

“He’s working things out, Al,” I said.

“He suffers from human frailty, perhaps” said Mr. Collier.
—Sportsman’s Paradise

If there is one thing I love in a man it is decripitude. If only I could love it in myself.
—Malaise

Misanthropy is a heartless pursuit, some might say. But misanthropy is the tonic of solitude.
—Sportsman’s Paradise

Bland and sleazy is a bad combination. Sleazy and hopeless is better.
—The Fiery Pantheon

“You have to take what comes to your door,” said Mr. Collier in his philosophical fashion. “And they came to my door,” he concluded—referring to the two champagne-soaked authors, who reposed on his lawn. “Two degenerates,” he said crisply, but fondly.
—Sportsman’s Paradise

St. Augustine had spent his youth in vice and dissipation, and look how he turned out.

But the idler’s lot is a sad one, and this I do not deny.
—Lives of the Saints

At that time usually you got home around four in the morning. That was good because I couldn’t go to bed until four in the morning. I was too hedonistic, did not follow my duty, and too often did not recognize where my duty lay, and in what it consisted. Now of course with all these small maniacal people—the kids—I do. You don’t have to be Albert Einstein to discern your duty there. It pins you down.
—Malaise

The Prosecutor was not winning when he moralized about the Governor, who is known for gambling, womanizing, and risqué bon mots, for people hold few things as dear as those.
—The Ritz of the Bayou

Mrs. Stewart held dominion over a vast field of worry encompassing not only her family but hotel guests and staff. Vast waves of worry emanated from her at all times. She was worried about each and every one of the guests arriving in this manner, how much they were drinking, why, and where it would ultimately lead. Each one was in deep, deep trouble, in her opinion, and their families should consider institutionalizing them.

Mrs. Stewart had been trained as a psychologist. Because she was a psychologist, she seemed to feel that everyone was mentally ill and should be institutionalized.
—The Fiery Pantheon

British people are pretty decadent, I think. Thank God someone is. Maybe it’s the loss of the empire. If you haven’t lost your empire yet, you have to be all uptight and puritanical. Whereas if you’ve lost your empire, anything goes. Like Cervantes, a failed writer in his late fifties before Don Quixote: “come to that fateful pass when failure reverses itself and becomes a freedom all its own.”
—Malaise

He made his surroundings elegant by his love for them.
—The Fiery Pantheon

Some places are in your destiny and in some places you are happy.
—The Fiery Pantheon

New Orleans is very beautiful and very painful. New York is not that beautiful and not that painful. It is just a normal American town.
—Sportsman’s Paradise

The mock-amazed congeniality of New Orleanians confronted with the spectacle of one another.
—Lives of the Saints

They don’t have baseball in New Orleans. It’s not normal enough to have baseball.
—Sportsman’s Paradise

Americans here have gotten their piece of the pie: they live in paradise and it’s close to the mall.
—Malaise

“What’s so great about this guy?” said Walter.

He was a regular guy, a decaying American businessman. It was curiously touching to her that she should attract such a one, plus that she should value his acquaintance. Why? Because he was weak, because he was drunk, because he was a regular American, in whose dark American dream there is life.
—The Fiery Pantheon

You could see the struggle: as if he had a kind of adversarial relationship with his grief, and had reached a sort of smooth agreement with it. It was an uneasy peace and had been hard won.
—Malaise

Henry Laines, the newlywed, had locked himself into one of the sons’ rooms and was sinking into a Weird Depression. Mary Grace was collapsed in a Hysterical Fit. One of the sons was home from Harvard on a vacation with a girl. The Harvard couple was passed out in a Drug Sordor on the living room couch.
—Lives of the Saints

He seemed to have a lot of ailments. He discovered that there was a British narcotic containing codeine on sale aboard the ship, with which he treated his consumption, while knocking back several glasses of a Turkish apertif resembling absinthe. Codeine and absinthe may seem like a singularly nauseous mixture and indeed produced cavernous silences accompanied by glazed stares.
—The Fiery Pantheon

She told me that sleeping with Henry was like sleeping with World War II.
—Lives of the Saints

That furrow in his brow that reminded me of War and Peace.
—Malaise

I had reached the stage of pregnancy where I can only read books about the execution of the Romanovs.
—Malaise

He ate just enough to work up to the first cigarette of the day.
—Lives of the Saints

Al takes a great interest in my boyfriends, although his conception of them is confined to whether they have a mustache, and his conception of a mustache seems to take in a wide variety of attributes.
—Sportsman’s Paradise

Strange. Here I was at forty, in the middle of the journey of our life, in a strange place where I knew no one, and where I could not get anyone in the entire state to pay me any mind, except for a debauched botanist, yet suddenly I was meeting with a towering international tycoon crazed with grief who made eccentric public appearances in his bathrobe at a Hollywood hotel.
—Malaise

I was working on a special project at the office, which was proofreading an eight-hundred-page book called Texas Business Law. . . . The author’s favorite phrase was when there was a case of negligence because someone was “off on a frolic of his own.” Every other sentence was that phrase. Someone was always “off on a frolic of his own” except for me, who was always proofreading Texas Business Law.

I wished instead that I could be off on frolics of my own.
—Lives of the Saints

I felt like I was going into a stupor. I could hear Mr. Stewart quoting from a famous book he owned that he always quoted from, which was a history of the battles of the Civil War written in verse. It filled me with dread.
—Lives of the Saints

In some families the young generation are lost souls because their forebears were legends.
—The Fiery Pantheon

They’re just always playing old songs where I live.
—Lives of the Saints

What destroys you, you remember, long after the victors have forgotten.
—The Fiery Pantheon

Screwballs like him are what makes the world go round, in my opinion. It calms you down. Off in his own world. That’s the thing.

The sorrows of the world are such that only a screwball can truly surmount them, even in his innocence.
—The Ritz of the Bayou

She had a nostalgia for a life that she had never led. That life was to be married and reside in New Orleans and watch football games with people wearing pink and yellow sweaters and green golfing slacks and on weekends revel in the bemusing hopelessness of Florida.
—The Fiery Pantheon

The Governor made what you might call many malapropisms, when he was on the stand.

“I’m not going to take a paralyzing oath on that one.”

“That’s the straw that pushed the camel across the stream, so to speak.”

“Where did you hear of that proverb—the straw that pushed the camel across the stream?” asked reporters.

“Ancient Egypt, you know, camels, different things,” said the governor’s brother, gesturing with his hand.
—The Ritz of the Bayou

“Some preachers talk about self-esteem,” said the born-again Christian, scathingly. “I’d rather hear a donkey bray at midnight in a tin barn,” he cried.
—The Ritz of the Bayou

“I thought you quit smoking.”

“I only smoke when I drink.”

“I thought you quit drinking.”

“I only drink on Fridays. And the weekends . . . ”
—The Oyster Diaries

Always in life, it is interesting to see the story of one who was wild and later abandons his vices.
—The Ritz of the Bayou

“How about some type of human interaction?” I suggested to Mac.

He thought it over.

“It’s too late in the day for human interaction,” he said.
—Malaise

We looked out at the gathering storm and he said, “Delery, the next half hour is going to be good for your soul.”

Because fear is good for the soul? The way despair can make you notice things more? That is the whole point of everything—to notice things more.
—The Oyster Diaries

You mind your own business, tending your own garden, expecting nothing, until, inevitably, someone is kind.
—The Ritz of the Bayou