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Dan Baum came to New Orleans two days after Hurricane Katrina as a reporter for The New Yorker. The encounter changed his life, and New Orleans became one of his fascinations, for good and ill, as with most fascinations. As he says, “I think part of my being ejected from The New Yorker was that I was always agitating for more space in the magazine for New Orleans. Because as big as this disaster was, it wasn’t the most interesting thing about the city.”

Elsewhere he continues: “New Orleans is so strange in the American context that it turns even the most casual visitor into an anthropologist, seeking to unlock the peculiar characteristics of the city’s inhabitants. This leads to a lot of on-the-fly generalizations that, upon further examination, turn out to be true.” New Orleanians care less about money than the inhabitants of other American cities. They think less about the future. They are less governed by the clock. They work less. They lead less solitary lives. They develop stronger neighborhood ties and family ties. They accept outsiders less.

“Long before the storm, New Orleans was by almost any metric the worst city in the United States – the deepest poverty, the most murders, the worst schools, the sickest economy, the most corrupt and brutal cops. Yet a poll conducted a few weeks before the storm found that more New Orleanians – regardless of age, race, or wealth – were ‘extremely satisfied’ with their lives than residents of any other American city.” That about sums up the mystery, doesn’t it?

This mystery explain why Nine Lives is worth reading, but a read of Nine Lives will most certainly not explain the mystery. It is worthwhile as another point of entry into the city, in the form of nine fairly complete lives, each with a compelling narrative arc. The nine are designed to have a Canterbury Tales-kind of encyclopedic quality for New Orleans – a jazz-playing city coroner, the wife of a famous Mardi Gras Indian, the local head of an electrician’s union who founded a museum, a middle-class football-playing transsexual bar owner, a King of Rex banker, a hard-bitten police officer, a Ninth Ward jailbird with a real flair for storytelling (who provides almost all the book’s color), an inspirational high school band leader with marital problems, and a poor bookish woman who tried all her life to escape the Ninth Ward and live the “white picket fence” life and kept on getting dragged back.

Baum’s approach is to tell the stories as if he were writing a novel, mostly narrating important transformative scenes in their lives, with dialogue and spare description colored by their perspective (hence when his character is black, Baum might use a term like “whitegirl;” when his character is white, he might use the term “nigger”). This approach works, in general: you get a fair amount of information about these nine people in 300 pages, and you feel that you have touched on many of the salient issues in New Orleans (and human) life, such as the relation of society to money, corruption to policing, incompetence to politics, dumb regulation to bureaucratic processes, violence to black neighborhoods, pregnancy to women’s ambitions, friendship to influence, and pageantry to New Orleans life in general. Many things you will hear people talk about in New Orleans are narrated here.

But certain things about the approach are ineffective. One is that it is probably impossible to have nine centers of attention in one 300 page book. And you certainly cannot do it the way Baum does, jumping from one center to another, sometimes after only half a page of narration. At times it is like sitting with a person who is trying to watch nine television shows. Baum is attempting to achieve simultaneity, but it does not really work. The best parts of the book are where he allows one story to take over for several pages at a time. (I will note that I am particularly interested in this problem technically, as I am currently writing a multi-centered novel and struggling to keep the parts together). The interwoven structure is particularly difficult because the threads do not necessarily work with each other – Baum, who chose chronology as the book’s organizing principle, does not have the maneuvering room of a novelist, who can have three scenes in a row with three separate sets of characters all be variations on fathers and sons (for instance). And yet he uses the technique of a novelist.

If you do the math, you will note that each person gets only just over thirty pages. Written dialogue and sustained narrative is not a very efficient medium for delivering the story of a person’s whole life over forty years in thirty pages. (In fact, seen from this perspective, Baum’s achievement looks notable against such difficult odds).

What is more, since the book is so focused on these nine lives, many of the other questions a reader is likely to have about the city go unanswered. Hurricane Katrina is a good example. The sheer intensity of these nine storm experiences leave you with many questions and no answers. This may well be the point. But it is frustrating – you learn, for instance, that for weeks after the storm New Orleans had no morgue, and so could not collect bodies, nor any jail, and so it could not arrest criminals. I would like to know a great deal more about the government failures that made situations like that possible. Or you learn that Mardi Gras Indians’ main occupation was to fight, in the manner of gangs. Why in the world was this?

Those are factual questions, and their answers can be found in other books (I presume; though it would have been nice for Baum to at least annotate a bibliography for us so we could find them easily). He is telling nine stories, not explaining an entire city. But there is another thing missing from Baum’s book, and that is the author’s perspective itself. It comes out, of course, as it has to, here and there, but there is almost no evaluation of the tales he is told, and nothing incisive. His jailbird goes in and out of Angola, without ever seeming to do anything wrong. That could be systemic racism or it could be massive denial or it could be the perspective of an amoral monster or it could be something else. And perhaps no one will ever know. But it would be interesting to get the interpretation of the stories, from the man who was close enough to them to record them. The racial segregation of the narratives is striking – but there is no discussion of this fact, merely narrative. This is one of the dangers of writing nonfiction about living people you want to be friends with afterwards. From the reader’s perspective, you want to tell the author that you’re going to turn off the tape recorder and you want him to go off the record and tell you what he really thinks. But he has constructed himself a form in which that would be impossible. You can feel the ultimate constriction this produces.

This is why the mystery of New Orleans remains neither explained nor even touched by the book. Ultimately, the only ways to understand a trance are to have a trance yourself (the best way), or to hear someone who has been in a trance describe the experience. But merely narrating the things a man did that got him into a trance is not enough. So with New Orleans – you feel it is not just the stories, but the feelings in between the stories, that you want. You feel that both Baum and his characters have had those mystical experiences with the city – but that his method of presentation does not convey it. This is why the first-person narrative, which he preserves word-for-word in one instance, is so much more compelling than the rest of the book. In fact, the voice of Anthony Wells, his Angola jailbird, is so mesmerizing it is almost worth the purchase price of the book all alone. And that is why the book ultimately points beyond itself to the literary possibilities of a place like New Orleans: a Canterbury Tales-type book where the perspective (a la Chaucer) is preserved, and the magic of each individual’s experience is presented as the key element in understanding the whole.

A note on style. The writing is generally not interesting in itself, as everything is subordinate to the narrative, and the narrative attempts to keep the “amateur” voices of the subjects. There are no ten-dollar words or imperishable sentences.

That said, when Baum is describing something well known in the city but perhaps unknown to his readers (which is infrequent; as a general rule he explains very little), he will resort to what I will call “the New Yorker style,” which is to use spicy descriptive adjectives, more for their spice than their appropriateness. Hence he describes Audubon Park as having a “misshapen” oval walking path. In terms of connotation, misshapen is the wrong word – the park was designed by Olmsted Brothers and is nothing if not shapely. But “misshapen” looks and sounds better – spicier – than “irregular,” and “sinuous” would be a tad erogenous. It is style over fidelity. Some people, of course, like this sort of writing and will probably wish he did more of it.

Just to close this, I’ll record some of the best bits of first-person narrative, all from Anthony Wells. They really are gems. I’ll have to control myself and make sure I don’t copy that entire part of the book.

“Then one day I woke up from a nap in the backseat and everything was green. I mean like green. Water everywhere. It looked like we were driving over water that had this thin skin of grass on top, like if you scraped up a spoonful of grass you’d find water underneath. And that spooky Spanish moss shit hanging from the trees – you ever see that? Like you’re in a horror movie. Green. And my dad’s music came on the radio. You should have seen my parents, man. Like they got their groove back. ‘Here we are. We’re in New Orleans,’ my dad says, and I’m seeing it, this place I been dreaming about. It’s all jam-packety, pretty old houses lined up one beside the other, each one a different color, with curlicues and flowers, and man, streets just full of people. White people, black people, mixed-race people, all jumbled up together and walking. Music right on the sidewalk and everything, and I don’t mean like one nigger with a guitar, but a whole band and drum set and everything, like the whole city is a big party. I’m looking out the window, eyes big as saucers – eight years old – and I’m thinking, this is a whole different way to be a Negro; I’m thinking, this is where Daddy gets his groove.

“We pull up to a light, and a cop car pulls right next to us. The cops are white, of course, but not like the storm troopers they got out in California; they’re kind of fat and rumpled up, like a couple of plumbers or something, you know what I’m saying? They kind of nod and smile, and Daddy smiles back. Smiling at a couple of white cops!” (39)

“I did maintenance at the Municipal Auditorium, got it ready for their Mardi Gras balls and shit, which was like fucking Gone With the Wind.” (91)

“What happened was, the wind started up ’long about nightfall. Well, I been in wind before, shit. But this time, man, it got louder and louder till you didn’t think it could get no worse. But it did, man. Stronger. Screaming like a thousand whistles. And we’re up on the second floor, the whole place is shaking. I kept thinking, okay, it’s played itself out, it’s going to stop now. But it didn’t. It went on and on and on. The lights was still on until, I don’t know, sometime late, a lightning bolt hit the transformer over by the canal and that motherfucker lit up the whole sky. BOOM! Blue fire – red, purple, and green fire. The lights blinked on and off, and then, bam, everything went dark. I look out, and there’s water up the windows downstairs. I’m thinking, we fucked up.

“At two o’clock, the neighbors start coming. Gwen and Jennifer and Steve and Nat and Guy, Geebee and Shortie – they all come, tied together so they wouldn’t blow off the steps. When I open the door, the wind takes it right off the hinges; I’m holding it by the knob and it’s like a big kite dancing around in my hand. We get that bitch nailed on and wind tears off the front roof. So now we got water coming in, the insulation hanging down. I took me a slug of liquor and curled up in the bathtub, thinking, that’s the safest place. I’m no pussy, but I got to tell you, man, this shit got right on top of my ass.” (219)

“The wind finally stop and we look outside, and I never seen so many stars. Sky was clear like I never seen it in New Orleans before, and there was no lights anywhere. It was like looking at the face of God, man. ” (223)

“I’m from New Orleans, man; I know how to work. But in Tennessee, man, it’s like going back in time. The white people think everything is theirs. Only reason we’re not sitting in the back of the bus is because they ain’t got no buses.” (287-8)

“It was like a dungeon, man, eight dudes to a cell and I’m the only black man in there. I had seven pencils sharpened, all taped together, just in case. ‘What you doing with all those pencils, boy?’ ‘I’m doing a lot of writing, sir.’” (291)

“Always been fucked-up here, man, but it’s home. Till you been someplace else, you don’t know.” (310)