Not long after moving to New Orleans, I walked by a woman pushing a stroller that contained a possum wearing a birthday hat. I did what any reasonable person would do and texted basically everyone I knew about this remarkable event. A few years later, I entered a crowded bar looking for a seat and realized that the only stool not occupied by a human patron was acting as a perch for a large tropical bird. This time, I merely said “Excuse me” (to the bird) as I shuffled past in search of a spot in the back.

You see a lot of strange things in this city, and eventually most of them are no longer worth texting your friends about. At a certain point, you can stop really noticing. Unless you’re the New Orleans writer Nancy Lemann, for whom “the whole point of everything” is “to notice things more.” Lemann, who is seventy, and whose books have been largely out of print for the past two decades, is enjoying some notice this spring, as two of her early works, “Lives of the Saints” (1985) and “The Ritz of the Bayou” (1987), are being reissued, and a semi-fictional novel, “The Oyster Diaries,” is being published for the first time. The first of these—a cult favorite among writers, particularly youngish women writers—put Lemann on the map as a singular stylist, capable of crystalline insights into the miscreants and oddballs of the American South and great bursts of unrestrained sentiment. Sort of like if Charles Portis listened to a lot of Joni Mitchell.

“Lives of the Saints” is narrated by Louise Brown, who has recently returned to her native New Orleans after four years of college in the Northeast, as she catalogues the various symptoms of decay among members of her Southern aristocratic class. It opens at the wedding of Henry Laines and Mary Grace Stewart, where, we are told, everyone has breakdowns, “including the bride and groom. Especially the bride and groom.” Lest you miss the tenor of the evening, Louise continues, “Everyone was too drunk. Everyone was unglued.” This is all in the first three paragraphs, and the breakdowns—a capacious category that, for Lemann, seems to encompass everything from rages to amiable fugues—do not let up. They befall men and women, children and the elderly; later, an entire family is afflicted in a single afternoon. One begins to think that the condition is hereditary—that, instead of a Habsburg jaw, the wealthy white denizens of New Orleans high society are saddled with emotional problems. Louise describes Mrs. Stewart, the mother of the bride, as a woman who “could spend an entire afternoon talking about what hat she wore when she was fifteen,” and Mrs. Stewart’s mother-in-law, rather fortuitously, as a woman for whom “there was no subject dearer to [her] heart than the subject of what hat she wore when she was fifteen.” Two pages later, the elder woman is telling Louise about a “little red hat” she wore in the summer of 1912.

Amid the sweltering heat and almost menacingly lush greenery, Louise compiles an exquisite taxonomy of local types. Mary Grace, who “had the spark of divine fire, which you find in a face not quite pretty enough,” is described as “the type of girl you see being dragged screaming from a convertible sports car outside of the bar at the Lafayette Hotel at three in the morning by her father and brothers.” An adorably irritating young child is introduced as “the type of person who would run into the house on weekday mornings and slide under the dining room table and make racing-car noises while everyone was trying to eat breakfast.” Louise, you could say, is the type of girl who likes to imagine a category of person with a sole inhabitant.

Familiarity breeds peevishness, and Louise is able to so precisely classify the “hysterics,” “catastrophes,” and “lunatics” of her milieu because they are too close for her own comfort. She is an observer and a product of a certain pathological excess: too much heat and too much booze, too much money and too much free time, all among people who live too much in the past and know too much about one another. The novel is like a sweaty, Southern “Brideshead Revisited,” being both about the dying world of a once triumphant class whose rule was never justified, and about how terrible it is to fall in love with a Catholic.

Here, the Catholic is Claude Collier, who has many sterling qualities, despite his fondness for hanging out with “wino lunatics, dissipated businessmen, crooked politicians, demented young lawyers, debutantes, alcoholics, and sleazy men.” Louise has known him since childhood, and his father, Mr. Collier, an eccentric lawyer, has acted as a sort of surrogate parent to her. In Claude—a wayward young man whom everyone nonetheless finds promising—Louise sees a vessel for her remaining idealism. He can hardly enter a scene without her near-ecstatic mention of his virtues: in the glow of Louise’s admiration, his profligacy becomes generosity, his indifference to the chaos around him a calm simplicity, his aversion to literature a sign of a more soul-deep wisdom. “It was the air about him, gentle and uncorrupt, some steady, noble thing,” she observes. He was “simply better than most people in his heart, and you could look up to him.”

Louise loves Claude in the way that you love someone when you are in your early twenties and have a job proofreading an eight-hundred-page book titled “Texas Business Law”: with blazing, idiotic conviction. But Lemann, to her credit, does not play this for laughs. You believe Louise when she declares, “My heart was not trained to love anyone but him. I could only love one person. This was my innate principle.” Those who have gone about their lives without falling for such a dissipated trap of a person may wonder how she could be so naïve. But the inevitability of doom does not lessen its impact. Like the unseemly family wealth that funds all those gin-soaked garden parties, or the nameless Black maids on their periphery, some truths are willfully ignored in the haze of romantic self-conception.

“One deception can be traded for another, greatness and betrayal lie beside each other closely intertwined,” Lemann writes early on in her next book, “The Ritz of the Bayou,” suggesting that she has learned a few things. The book, a work of nonfiction that began as an assignment for Vanity Fair, is ostensibly about the governor of Louisiana being charged with bribery and corruption, but it serves primarily as a way to turn Lemann’s eye for disgrace and disrepair to a broader set of social circumstances. She is less interested in outlining the facts of the case—Governor Edwin Edwards and seven associates, including his brother and nephew, were indicted for fraud and bribery related to an alleged scheme that involved selling state hospital permits—than in painting the various scenes and characters in and around it. “There is so much human frailty floating around that it is a dramatic thing to see,” Lemann writes. “I had never seen so much of it, all at once, and it was a sort of breathtaking spectacle.”

The book is told through a whirlwind series of vignettes, some no longer than a few sentences: one minute Lemann is making an arch observation about the Louisiana Board of Ethics, the next she is in raptures about trees. Always, her eye is drawn away from the spectacle of the trial and toward the people who make spectacles of themselves. This includes the notoriously charming Governor Edwards, often accompanied by his “long-suffering wife” and “bombshell daughter,” the Governor’s nephew (“fraud defendant by day, cocktail bar pianist by night”), a stereotypically Southern lawyer named Pappy Triche, and the “jazz-crazed assistant prosecutor,” who appears everywhere but inside the courtroom. Also in the mix are the Governor’s many female admirers who show up to watch the trial, and a gaggle of fellow-reporters, one of whom eventually becomes Lemann’s lover. Despite the seriousness of the charges, she reports, “a lot of people in the courtroom were psychotically jolly.”

But Lemann herself is a bit confounded, at least when she arrives. The outcome of the trial seems foreseeable early on. “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,” she notes dryly. Prospective jurors have a litany of poor excuses: illness, the possibility that a nephew knows the Governor, constipation. Everything is taking too long: “The Prosecutor had sixty-five witnesses. We were on number three at the time. Reporters sometimes grew depressed.” Lemann finds an unexpected bright spot in an attorney named Camille Gravel, who, she has heard, managed to tame the wildness of his youth and is now the most dignified and elegant man in the whole city—a rare home-town boy who made good.

The real action happens outside of the courtroom—at the Cairo Club, or the bar at the Lafayette Hotel, or F&M Patio Bar—where the heat and the music and the drinks have a way of bringing Lemann back to herself. “You may be filled with longing and unease, but one thing you know—when you are there, your ticker’s back in business,” she writes. Though the events of “The Ritz of the Bayou” play out in the course of almost a year, reading the book feels like spending one long night out with a brilliant stranger you’ve met at a bar, one who can tell you the kinds of stories you would hopelessly mangle if you attempted to repeat them.

Not everyone thought that this was a good thing. The critic James Wolcott, in his introduction to the book, recounts being in the office of Tina Brown, who was the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair at the time, when she first received Lemann’s draft, and how Brown was “dissatisfied—borderline exasperated—with the copy.” Lemann had not included any facts or details about the trial. She forgot to mention what the charges even were. In fairness to Brown, this is true. Instead of legal analysis, Lemann writes extensively in the book about a man she meets on the train who insists on calling her his “little shrimp remoulade.” There is a whole section devoted to a secret committee for an even more secret Mardi Gras social club, the purpose of which was to draw up psychological profiles of prospective members based on drawings they did of a horse. In return for her weird, digressive, and highly mannered manuscript, Lemann received a kill fee. The implication is that she got distracted and failed to notice the most important things. But this is precisely wrong. It is only because Lemann turns her gaze to the things that really matter to her—how people act, and what they believe 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.

New Orleans looks a little different forty years later, and so does Lemann. Her new book, “The Oyster Diaries,” finds a Lemann-esque woman named Delery Anhalt, originally from New Orleans, now living in a tony D.C. neighborhood, having traded her wastrel youth for a respectable late middle age. (Parts of the book initially appeared as first-person pieces in Harper’s Magazine and The Paris Review.) As the novel opens, Delery becomes, in her typical fashion, “riddled with disgrace on a minute-by-minute basis.” At first, her despair is a little hard to fathom. She has two woke daughters who find her politics retrograde, in-laws who annoy her, and a husband whom she loves, though in her description of that love you begin to suspect where we’ll find trouble: “The ordinary things he left in his wake, like his allergy-ridden Kleenex strewn among the bedsheets, had emanated that strange radiance to me, as if they were the relics of saints.”

We learn that Delery’s saintly husband is capable of profound betrayal, the kind that makes you “mentally nauseous to think of.” She couldn’t see what was right in front of her. So she heads home to New Orleans, where she revels in memories of a youthful fling she once had with a man in whom she observed “a loping generosity and angelic self-effacement that dispelled my doubts in man.” His name, as it happens, is Claude Collier. This Claude Collier is twenty-eight, a year older than the one we first meet in “Lives of the Saints.” This Claude Collier woos Delery and eventually marries the “long-suffering” Louise, who leaves him years later. This Claude Collier takes a job at his father’s law firm after Mr. Collier dies of a heart attack, opting to stay in New Orleans rather than abruptly disappearing as he does at the end of “Lives of the Saints.”

It’s probably for the best that Mr. Collier is killed off here, since many of his most memorable qualities—a love of the law, a Yankee transplant wife, a habit of eating oysters every day at noon at the Pearl—have been given to another character, Delery’s father, August Anhalt. These enduring quirks have their origin in Lemann’s life: in “The Ritz of the Bayou,” she writes about her father, an eccentric lawyer who appears as “the courtroom philosopher,” and who keeps a log with the date and grade (B+, C) of the oysters he eats every day at the Pearl.

“This story does not start at the same old party,” Lemann writes in the final section of “The Oyster Diaries.” “I would have to be the same old girl for that.” And yet the story does start again. Claude Collier is once again generous and noble. Lemann, like the talkative older ladies of her youth, clutches the motifs of her past like talismans. Her tendency to repeat herself, the compulsion that gives her work such a musical quality and that has so confounded reviewers (“Why does she so persistently and jarringly use repetitions?” a critic wrote in the L.A. Times in 1987), is both her greatest tool and her greatest theme. Perhaps, she suggests, repetition could be seen less as a compulsion than as a mark of inimitable style. A pair of women at a wedding can once more discuss the hats they wore at fifteen. A lawyer can eat oysters every day at noon at the Pearl, and can show up in three different books doing exactly that. Like a warm summer night or a third cocktail, Lemann lulls and envelops you. Like a breakdown, she lets you get carried away. ♦