The Ritz of the Bayou

Reviews / Votes

"A humid, meandering, late-period miniature masterpiece of the New Journalism." -Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"It is only because Lemann turns her gaze tot he things that really matter to her-how people act, and what they believe in in spite of the facts facing them-that the book feels like a small miracle. And she gets away with it in the same way Governor Edwards did: with an abundance of style. [...] Like a warm summer night or a third cocktail, Lemann lulls and envelops you. Like a breakdown, she lets you get carried away." -Brandy Jensen, The New Yorker


"Although Nancy was a protege of Gordon Lish, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Walker Percy, her literary voice from the outset was assuredly, distinctively hers. In temperament and sensibility, she seems to me closer to F. Scott Fitzgerald than any of her mentors-or perhaps she's Scott and Zelda rolled into one, her work suffused with a longing for a lost glamour. And she has no imitators." -James Wolcott


"To that downhome recipe of styled rhetoric and ironic levity, Lemann allots a new ingredient in The Ritz of the Bayou: fragmentation. White space is vital to the method. Via the typographical TARDIS known as the section break, Lemann hops through space and time as she reports on the trial. An Eisensteinian montage of zippy one-liners, anecdotes, maxims, and asides, The Ritz of the Bayou trusts readers to bring meaning to the work, to fill the white space on their own, to parse all the lies and damn lies of the South." -Snowden Wright, the Oxford American


"The piquancy of the book stems from Ms. Lemann's evident sympathy for this point of view. Her affections are initially for the governor and his charismatic cohort the way that Louise's are for Claude. Edwards is eventually acquitted, but the trial becomes so laborious that it loses its antic charm. By the end of the account, Ms. Lemann seems fed up with dashing miscreants. Something long on the brink of collapse, one senses, has finally toppled over." -Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal


"This atmospheric, fragmented, and admirably peculiar work, which had only one hard-cover printing and no paperback run, deftly captures New Orleans's idiosyncratic 'tropic zone,' where 'a flawed thing may be more full of life than a perfect thing,' and any event possesses the capacity to become a spectacle. Focused on the chaos of Louisiana's governance, with its yearning for charismatic kings over staid leaders, the book can be seen as a bellwether for contemporary politics." -Lauren LeBlanc, The Drift


"[Lemann] liked to be colloquial, digressive, repetitive. She says she inherited her worldview and style from New Orleans, whose 'remoteness' lent itself to eccentricity." -Marie Solis, the New York Times


"At the core of the book is Lemann's passionate, funny, unsettling description of what it feels like to be back home, and she comments often on the rich, troubled character of New Orleans and the South generally. The reprise of The Ritz of the Bayou [creates] the perfect opportunity for a fresh audience to encounter her unforgettable literary voice." -Maria Browning, Chapter 16


"Though Ritz covers the first two Edwards trials back-to-back, Lemann writes it in fiercely nonlinear order, a luminous slurry of lyrical fragments and set pieces that somehow, in mirroring the befuddlement of justice that took place and has always taken place, in some sense, in the state of Louisiana, is able to generate more meaning than a strict reportorial view ever could." -Adrian Van Young, Southwest Review


"Vignettes in The Ritz [of the Bayou] form a montage of a blessed and blighted place. Sitting bench side at the trial, we meet a murderer's row of charismatic crooks, drunks, and philosophers. All of them so specifically rendered that you feel they must be real. I've found it's sometimes hard to believe New Orleans is a real place once you've left it. But thank god we've got writers like this to remind us. Though I urge you to stock up on all the work coming out of the Lemann-aissance, maybe put on the Ritz first." -Brittany Allen, Literary Hub


"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." -Levi Stahl, This Not That


"It takes a certain kind of guts as a writer to trust in one's own aesthetic instincts that much. Her account of the seemingly endless trial is all atmosphere, a kind of tone poem of charismatic corruption." -Matt Hanson, The Arts Fuse


"Lemann brings a combination of levity and deep spiritual grappling to her work that I can only describe as miraculous." -Abby Rosebrock, Book Post


"This radical take on true crime returns to print forty years after its first publication. Lemann focuses less on the facts of Governor Edwin Edwards's two corruption trials and more on the environments, systems and social conventions that make crime possible, e.g., the ways people can be turned into characters, how longstanding cultural and social networks create opportunity and permission for wrongdoing, how climate influences behavior. The crime may have been an act of corruption by the sitting governor of Louisiana, but the story is much deeper than that. How do they get away with it? Charm, society, and humidity." -Josh at Porter Square Books