Letters From New Orleans
By Rob Walker
Garrett County Press, 2006
ISBN 1-891053-01-9
226 pages

It would be deceptively easy to refer to Rob Walker’s collection of pre-Katrina essays as something like a “poetic look at a now devastated city” or a “pleasant return to the best days of the Big Easy.” It would be cheesy but effective and get the basic point across. Walker lived in New Orleans before the hurricane and levee failure, and he wrote about a lot of different things that intrigued him about his town: neighborhoods, restaurants, parties and people. That sort of description would make Letters From New Orleans sound like a pleasant collection, a nice diversion, but it would not be appropriate at all. Walker has done more than write some musings about the place he lived; he has, in spite of the storm or because of it, created a lovely time capsule for what once was the Crescent City.

His book is history now, even though he never intended it as such. And that makes reading it all the more fascinating. The reader cannot help but wonder what has happened to the people and places that Walker describes — what is left of the city he came to love. This gives the collection an aura of poignancy that it never intended to have and makes it far more relevant than its author probably ever imagined.

Walker's descriptive passages paint a memorable picture of New Orleans, like the description of the houses that “… are built high, and often there’s a big, massive, marvelous staircase of some sort leading up to a porch and a front door that might be three feet or even six feet off the ground.” Beyond these casual digressions, though, it was the essays on real people like Ernie “K-Doe” Kador that really interested me. In discussing K-Doe’s life and lounge, Walker gives readers an interesting view of the rather eccentric singer. But more than just a look at the surface, he finds what made K-Doe endearing. “If there’s any joke attached to the singular phenomenon of K-Doe,” writes Walker, “he was the only one in on it. Here’s a guy who created his own reality, simply by believing in it, or at least seeming to. And it worked.” This intimate way of seeing his subjects, of knowing them, gives Letters a feeling that is far more personal then other books of a similar nature.

Walker also visits the area under I-10 along North Claiborne Avenue, reminding readers of what that area gave up so the larger city could enjoy more direct transportation. It’s a story that has been retold relatively often in recent months, but for those new to this particular chapter in negative urban planning, it will be deeply troubling. The author gives it all a modern spin, however, commenting on the ways in which Claiborne clings to its vital nature — insists upon still being relevant even as it falls further into decay and despair. “My point here isn’t to romanticize these neighborhoods, or to condemn the decision to slash an interstate through them,” writes Walker. “I’m neither sentimental nor angry about North Claiborne. But I am somewhat awestruck.”

He gets you with observations like that — thoughts you don’t expect. That’s Walker not taking the easy way out, something that he proves himself worthy of again and again in each essay he writes.

For people not intimately familiar with the city’s secrets, the most surprising essay may well be “High Society.” It is here that Walker breaks down the different components of New Orleans’s upper crust, revealing all the sordid racism and egotism that is apparently as much a part of Mardi Gras history as the beads and Indians. The Rex ball is televised; the Comus and Momus krewes refused to say they wouldn’t discriminate; the rich get dressed up and drunk; and the middle class shake their heads at both the hypocrisy they are watching and the fact that they bother to watch it. “The basic transaction seems to be that these aristocrats give us all the gift of Carnival and in return they get to play dress-up and belong to exclusive clubs. Their goal is not to recognize and welcome new members into their society; their goal is to protect what they have.”

Is it any wonder how much of New Orleans was left behind during Katrina? In some ways, as Walker observes, it seems as if the city has been leaving some of its people behind forever. He gives a bit of a warning here — a perceptive look into a future that he could not have foreseen:

“Sometimes I think this is funny, and sometimes I think it’s sad, because New Orleans is, emphatically, not a city that can afford an aristocracy. And it almost goes without saying that the romantic past they honor is highly selective — its better points exaggerated, its worse aspects ignored, until it becomes a comfortable fiction. And so it is that the more such people succeed in convincing themselves that they matter, the less they really do.”

Perhaps that is why Walker’s book succeeds — he does not set out to prove anything with it other than his own desire to write about a place he found fascinating. He walks through neighborhoods past and present, into the history of a bar or a song, and compels readers again and again to think about their own views of the world around them, to consider how they would recall and record the life they are living at any given time. The Rex ball could just be something on television one night or it could be the doorway for one author to use to peek at a city’s soul. If you’re a good enough writer, Walker proves, you could even find a way to write about a place that so many have already claimed as their own literary birthright. He’s that kind of good, and Letters From New Orleans is a wonderful example of a unique talent.