a New Orleans travel diary

I spent most of June and early July traveling or moving. Everywhere is hot and humid; everywhere I complained about the heat. Reading another person’s vacation recap is as boring as watching slides of someone else’s vacation used to be, I imagine, so I’ll skip the details except for these: my favorite travel read.

I’m always an ambitious vacation reader. I overpack, I choose fat novels, I act like I’m still capable of reading in the car without getting a migraine. (It’s this impulse that had me packing Miss Macintosh, My Darling for my train ride to New York.) I like to read thematically, which is why I read The Ritz of the Bayou by Nancy Lemann just before my friends and I drove to Lake Charles for a wedding. 

I picked it up from a recommendation in The Drift’s newsletter, and I read it thinking we wouldn’t stop in New Orleans. I was in a car accident a few weeks before the trip, and was still nursing a knee injury that made travel difficult. I wanted to read something that made me feel like I was in New Orleans as we drove through the swamps and rice fields of Louisiana, even though I wouldn’t make it all the way there.

It’s probably a mark of 1980s literary publishing decadence that Lemann could write a factless, narrative-less vibe check of a book about a multi-year government corruption scandal and still get it published, but a mark of Lemann’s talent that I still had a great time reading it in 2024. The Ritz of the Bayou is ostensibly about a mid-1980s trial of the Louisiana governor for fraud or racketeering or something along those lines–the details never quite become clear, and the trial is increasingly sidelined for character sketches of various participants and hangers-on. You get the sense as you read that this is both a deliberate conceit–the governor is eventually acquitted, and the jury seems as unclear on the charges as the reader–and Lemann’s natural style, a style intrinsic to her status as a native daughter of New Orleans. 

I did end up going to New Orleans, for one perfect, touristy day. We drove through a downpour just before we crossed Lake Pontchartrain that I thought would wash the truck right off the road. We walked through the French Quarter and ducked into a bar where a live band was playing jazz; we took our hurricanes to the to-go window of Cafe du Monde for iced cafe au laits and beignets. It was Father’s Day: I called my dad from the steps across from Jackson Square that lead down into the Mississippi. We rushed into Faulkner House Books out of a thunderstorm and the familiar chill of air-conditioning on sweat-soaked skin comforted me. 

Ritz isn’t a travelogue, or even necessarily positive about Lemann’s native city, but the images in my mind as I walked through the French Quarter were hers: drinking bourbon in a hotel bar during a downpour; lawyers in increasingly squalid suits as the humidity builds; a former lover appearing only to leave again; the crazed governor escaping sequestration for an impromptu parade among his constituents. Having read Lemann, it made perfect sense to me that I ran into a man I vaguely know, who lives thousands of miles away, on a corner of Bourbon Street. Her language–her own “drama of the tropics”–overlaid my experience. 

The last time I was in New Orleans I was 23 and also injured, though less visibly. I was in charge of explaining the American South to teenagers from Seattle: the spiritual and historical import of the whole scope of southern history as seen through the places we were visiting. I mostly failed, I think. I wish I had read Lemann then, who understood the overwhelming feeling of returning home from colder climes.

In the opening pages, before Lemann is even fully back in New Orleans, she meets the kind of odd characters that will populate the rest of the book: a sad, drunk man in a white suit, a woman going to stay with her sister because she’s fed up with her husband. Lemann, the consummate observer, takes all this in stride. She writes: “One thing you know–when you are in the South, approaching your hometown–is that your ticker’s back in business. This may have strange effects.”