The house on First Street My New Orleans story

I REALLY wanted to pan this book. First of all, with the exception of Walker Percy's "Moviegoer," I tend to dislike literature about New Orleans (oh the decadence! the quaintness!), and publicity copy for "The House on First Street" boasted about Julia Reed's "colorful" critique of the city's "rich flavor." It's also a Hurricane Katrina memoir. I'd considered writing my own Katrina memoir, and now I realize I probably never will. True, my own house in New Orleans was reduced to a moldy ruin, and Reed's had nothing but a broken window, but hers - previously owned by Percy's brother Phin (fun fact) - is a 6,000-square-foot Greek Revival landmark in the historic Garden District, while my house is a 1,400-square-foot cottage in the (comparatively) raffish neighborhood of Gentilly. And not only is Julia Reed a lot richer than I, she has better journalistic cred: as an evacuee, I wrote a few columns for Slate, while Reed was bombarded with assignments from Newsweek, The Spectator and Vogue, her main employer, whose editors received an e-mail message from Reese Witherspoon, no less, asking if Reed was O.K. That I am willing to forgive Reed that last detail is a measure of how much, against the odds, I enjoyed this book. The author strikes me as a decent egg, for one thing, and we certainly agree about what makes New Orleans worthwhile. When, for instance, Reed rented a pied-à-terre on Bourbon Street in the early '90s, she was able to savor what Willie Morris called "the juxtapositions" - the fact that she was lulled to sleep each night "by the bass beat of 'I Will Survive'" from the gay bars on either side of her, and roused in the morning by a nun singing "My Country 'Tis of Thee" over a loudspeaker at the nearby Cathedral Academy. Also, Reed likes to advert to the city's "killer lifestyle" (as the local coroner puts it): the love of food and drink and danger that makes New Orleanians among the most obese, cancer-ridden, frequently murdered and fun-loving people in the country, the kind of sybarites who get to drink and drive - legally - so long as their beverage is frozen (hence all those drive-through daiquiri stands). And finally Reed knows just how tiresome the local gentry are, what with the dopey elitism of their Mardi Gras "krewes" (Cornus, Momus), whose selective membership they will defend to the death while lesser institutions (schools, government) are allowed to rot. Reed moves to New Orleans in the hope of lighting a candle in this darkness - not to mention partaking more fully of the killer lifestyle - and so buys that mansion on First Street, despite its daunting need of repair. Some of the book's lighter moments have to do with her entanglement with a feckless contractor named Eddie, who likes to say "It's an old house" whenever he botches a job. Anyone who has ever dealt with an Eddie will long for the cathartic moment when Reed seems about to follow through on her threat to kill him - but alas, by the time she's finally ready to beat him over the head with a corroded pipe, he's absconded to Mexico. As for Reed's Katrina experience - well, strange to say, it made me rather nostalgic for my own. (I'm reminded of what Percy said about the weird gaiety of disaster.) Like Reed and her husband, my wife and I gave a dinner party the night before evacuation, and the next day we wondered what to do with the garbage; as Reed formulates this dilemma, "should we put it outside, where it would be another projectile, or inside, where it would surely stink up the place." And then, too, there was the initial festivity of evacuation, before one learned about the flooding and looting and random violence. Reed is reunited with loved ones in Greenville, Miss., where she eats lavishly and begins to gain "the Katrina 15" - a phrase that prompted another shock of recognition for this reader, though I wish I'd eaten half so well as Reed. Every few pages a meal is described in almost Proustian detail, including a barbecue feast that Reed orders for 700 members of the National Guard in New Orleans: "They had cleaned up the place and restored order to 'Dodge City,' and so far they had not seen the mayor or the police chief or the governor - somebody had to welcome them, and I realized for the millionth time how easy it is to make people happy by feeding them." Lest this seem a little frivolous, Reed does not stint on the more tragic incongruities. Four blocks from her mansion with its one broken window (and less than two from my pre-Gentilly apartment on the bleaker side of Jackson Avenue) was a corpse covered with a sheet held down by bricks and bearing the legend, "Here lies Vera ... God Help Us." This while the president flew above the devastation in Air Force One and commended "Brownie" for doing "a heckuva job" - or, for that matter, while Reed and her friends worried over how to dispose of their toxic refrigerators. Such a problem, to be sure, amounts to a "Marie Antoinette moment," Reed says, but at least she concedes her own celebratory cake-eating: "We are still alive, we are saying to one another, and more than that, we are still here, in New Orleans, because we choose to be." Vogues editors received an e-mail message from Reese Witherspoon, asking if Reed was O.K. after Katrina. Blake Bailey is the author of "Cheever: A Life," which will be published early next year.

Reed, respected journalist, contributing editor to Vogue and Newsweek, and celebrator of all things southern, tells her personal story of the devastation of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. She traveled to New Orleans in 1991 for an interview and never quite left. Fifteen years later, she married and bought a house on First Street in the Garden District. Four weeks after they moved in, Katrina hit. Although Reed's home was relatively unharmed, those whom she had come to know and care about were not so lucky. She got involved in her adopted city's recovery, from bringing 80 pounds of barbecue and fixings to the National Guardsmen to saving her homeless, hapless handyman, Antoine. She chronicles the openings of the restaurants and clubs before and after the power outages and paints a picture of a city of grace and courage with a fierce will to live. The tone of this book is not as light and witty as her book of essays, but it is a heartfelt and involving glimpse of one of our country's biggest disasters.--Dickie, Elizabeth Copyright 2008 Booklist