Repair It by Flight: Nancy Lemann’s Lives of the Saints – Liv Golvin
November 10, 2025
Lives of the Saints by Nancy Lemann is a quick witted novel, moving in a fun way, meant to be devoured in an afternoon. It seems to have made a recent impact, because after being difficult to find for years, it is being reprinted by NYRB in 2026, 41 years after it was originally published. This makes sense, as it feels achingly similar to Cassandra at the Wedding, except that Cassandra at the Wedding takes place in California, and Lives of the Saints is about New Orleans. In the languorous climate, the characters live languorous lives that descend into chaos, but chaos that goes with the flow. In the North, chaos tends to be harder; a person Having Breakdowns (Lemann seems to have popularized this fashion of capitalizing phrases to emphasize their meaning) in the North is met with harsher realities of cold winters and angry families. The line of the story melds with a beautiful description of life in the South; the narrator does not examine the strange distance between the drunken “wastrel youth contingent,” their parents, and the “black maids in white clothes,” but takes them for what they are, having the reader do the same. The dialogue is poetic and delightful, with a lot of funny one liners from characters who have had too many cocktails.
Louise narrates the book in a way that makes it clear that while she has grown up with the people she spends her time with, she sees herself as separate from them, having just returned from college in the North. She uses “we” to describe her interactions with these people, integrating the reader easily into loving the same dissolute people she has known all her life, while still acknowledging the strange quirks she uses to give them depth. Louise falls in love with Claude, a man she has known all her life, yet finds her anew at the wedding of his old girlfriend that begins the novel. Their love story is vague in its beginning, middle, and end. She and those around her are rather aimless, living decadent lives, and the story is rather aimless as well, though it captures a feeling very lucidly. Things happen, she falls in love, she goes out drinking, she loses her job, but everything flows like water, taking the reader along vividly. I know how Louise feels— the reader sees intimately the feeling of not knowing what is happening, but sticking around anyways, and then being left, and only understanding afterwards that you will never understand.
The novel itself kind of washes over you; there is no definite scene or extreme drama that ends the affair. The love story is told as you would tell your own love story to friends you meet years after a split has occurred. The events themselves are solid, and actually happen. We begin with a wedding and everything is turned sideways at a child’s funeral midway through the book, though both events take place in the same place and are filled with much of the same Breakdowns. But the dissolutions of love are not clear, and neither really is the scaffolding of the bond. The bond of love is built in glances, in looks, in the grasp of a hand, in gentle yet firm lovemaking in the middle of the night, none of which can really be described. Louise is solid in her love, accepting of Claude, not seeing that he is not only no good, but also slipping away. She describes herself as having affections that “are carved in stone.”
Despite having read this novel many times, I have never understood Claude in the way my lovers feel similarly flimsy in the afterglow of faded love. I can describe, like Louise, how they made me feel. I can describe the situations and dates early on, the people that we interacted with, but I can’t fundamentally recreate the things that really led to us falling in love. For Claude, the grief he has after the death of his young brother, the eponymous Saint, seems to be both a catalyst to clutch Louise and a catalyst for eventually letting her go. Did he realize? Louise is not sure, so the reader is never sure what Claude is aware of. We never know what our lovers think, and their words at the end are so rarely true. Louise never delves into negativity when describing Claude. She focuses on his intense kindness, and sees the trouble he gets into as youthful folly rather than a part of who he is. But his total goodness is a glow created by Louise’s steadfast affection and sureness, the Louise who says: “I could only love one person. This was my innate principle.” Her admiration for Claude extends to, or is because of, her admiration for his father, whose wedding ring is engraved with the phrase: “I cling to thee.” (Claude’s father is deeply philosophical and eccentric in the way of an English country squire; he delivers incredible advice to the reader such as how “three-fourths of all sorrow is self-pity.”)
Louise knows she loved Claude, and then he left, and so she “climbed the sharp hill that led to all the years ahead,” because that is what we must do. Sometimes, to those much is given much is required means that girls with big hearts are shown the door— the man they love does not want to, or cannot, meet the requirements. Their men choose no longer to be given to.
When I think of him, of my Claude, I know that he is special because I imbued him with the power that my love allowed. He will always be special to the girl I was then, but just as you can never step in the same river twice, so the girl that imbued him with love is lost to the past. I still know, and sometimes see, my Claude, but as he is now, no longer with the power my love gave him. My Claude only lives on in my memories, where I was in awe of him because I loved him without really knowing him. This is no Cathy and Heathcliff, with souls made of the same stuff. Those who do not meet each other on the same plane of giving and receiving and openness and bravery will be torn apart. Though Lives of the Saints has the narrative of a somewhat shallow story, it is viscerally relatable to anyone who has been left, realizing that their claws have dug into only the potential. In their last conversation, Claude acknowledges that Louise has projected onto him someone he is not.
“‘Louise, you pick the wrong person to idolize. You have said many pleasant things about me, heart, but I am not the person you portray. … You talk about my heart— you are my heart,’ he said. ‘And there you are, just sitting there like everything is completely normal.’ …”
The last words she speaks to him are “Be careful,” as he goes off to handle the shady business he has become embroiled in at the racetracks, business Louise describes as “not fitting into his character.” The novel ends with Claude disappearing for years. Is the real Claude the one Louise portrays, or the one he believes he is? The woman who knows him, and knows his family, and has loved him, wants to see the best. But was it really ever there? She gave her heart to him, and he found himself unable to meet the requirements of this enormous responsibility, preferring to fall into the languid dissolution that forms the heart of Lemann’s South.
“Things fade away from most people’s hearts. What fades away from their hearts can be ardor, pain, or dignity, it doesn’t matter, but it fades away, like the grip of a fist relaxing.”