I have never been to New Orleans, and I am afraid of ever going. Too strong an affinity for haunts of dissipation; too great a tendency in general to linger; too powerful a fascination with shellfish of all kinds: I am afraid the first oyster bar I walked into would finish me entirely. Old friends would stumble across me, 20 years later, still slurping the same bivalves. Nancy Lemann’s Lives of the Saints, first published in 1985 and recently reissued by NYRB Classics, does nothing to allay this fear.The book follows a period in the life of Louise Brown, native daughter of New Orleans and recent college graduate, with nothing much to do upon her return from the east, except to hear “dawlin” bellowed by old family friends across the Sazerac Bar, perform haphazard secretarial work at a law firm, and drift in and out of the Collier home. The Colliers live, fortuitously, at the corner of Indulgence and Religion, in one of the “antebellum mansions sunk awry on their foundations.” Mr. Collier translates Homer and considers the great questions; his wife is a transplanted Yankee. They still dress in evening wear for dinner; their black butler, Chester, wears a tuxedo and mixes drinks. Their son, Claude, invented a distinctive patented shrimp peeler after slipping on a banana peel and dropping out of college (not in that order). Its earnings, along with horse track bets, fund his dissipated late 20s. Louise is hopelessly in love with him. Eventually, a tragedy strikes; he leaves for the north, and she, after getting herself dismissed from the office for setting a trash can on fire and other mishaps, follows him.