Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 - (Page 63)

progress you need to know what it has rolled over or left behind. ago, it would have been OK. But everybody was much And when progress is moving as fast as it now is, recalling its more attuned to exactly what they were bringing in and victims is difficult. New Orleans keeps its anachronisms alive much more able to move to another shop and kind of eat long enough for them to throw the outside world into sharp relief. what they killed. For instance, until the mid 1990s you could find actual So the first thing that happened was the most profitable gentleman lawyers in New Orleans who thought of themselves part of the firm, a handful of litigators, up and left because mainly as members of an honorable and dignified profession. One they didn’t want to subsidize the people who were being of these dinosaurs was my father. kept on. The thing just unraveled. He made a very old Sartisky: I think that’s a brilliant analytic passage. The world, old-fashioned decision and it ended up with the contrast between New Orleans and Atlanta’s character is firm going out of business. His role just doesn’t exist any captured by Michael as well as anyone has, certainly as well more. Lawyers aren’t like the way he was when I was as Mr. Toole for example. This may not growing up. I can remember—I was 11 be fiction, but it comes to terms with or 12 years old—there was an accident So I had a story that was the city in the same way. Your on State Street. I was riding my bike characterization of Atlanta is one of home from the Newman School and I about not baseball, it was my favorite. I hate Atlanta. The city is saw the accident. Sprinting down the about the way markets really an airport. You go to the block from the other direction was a value or fail to value people, museum of the City of Atlanta and man with a card in his hand. I followed they describe themselves—this isn’t him…and he was a lawyer. “You want baseball was just an excuse me describing them, this is actually on to sue?” He was explaining to these to write that story. their wall—Atlanta describes itself as people what he did and I thought, a” suburban metropolis” with “That’s a lawyer? A lawyer does that? I absolutely not one iota of irony. They don’t realize that went home to my father and I said, is that what you do? He that’s pretty goddamn funny when you come down to it, said, no, no, that’s another kind of lawyer. That’s not our until you try to drive through it, at which point it’s a kind of lawyer. But now everybody’s that kind of lawyer. I nightmare. But I’d like to talk about your insight into New think it’s become a much more commercialized profession, Orleans a little bit. About what it is that has kept New much more on a financial hair-trigger. Orleans, for better or for worse, from becoming Atlanta. Sartisky: Most writers have to let experience percolate What is there essentially in the impact on the quality of life through them and then reflect back upon it. They tend to be and on a profession like your father’s which is suddenly writing looking backwards. I mean this, Michael, you’re finding itself confronted by the twin evils of Morris Bart one of the very few writers in any genre who writes looking advertising and then the Internet. forward. It’s extremely unusual. There’s a very short Lewis: My father’s job does not exist any more. The law passage where he says, “I recall the feeling when it first firm went out of business, and the way it went out of dawned on me that the ground beneath my teenage feet was business—it was the old family law firm—was very telling. moving. I did not enjoy the premonition of doom in my father’s One of its biggest customers was Louisiana Power and world. But what troubled me even more was that some part of me Light. They decided to take their legal business in house. wanted my father to have his own billboard beside the highway, This was 1995, 1996. My father was running the law firm which of course he would never do. My response was to leave and he thought that the way you handled that in house— home and invent another self for myself. Had the Internet been we are a partnership—you share the burden and you move available I might have simply gone online. on and you find new clients. So instead of instantly firing Here’s a young man then who comes out of New all the lawyers who were associated with that account, he Orleans and its very mannered and self-referential identity. kept everybody on. As we said earlier “Our ancestors on the walls.” Someone I think if he’d done told me when I first came here that the predominant that 30 or 40 years religion here was not Catholicism but Southern Shintoism Winter 2007-08/LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES 63

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 Contents Friends Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Katrina: Days of Terror, Months of Anguish Paintings by Rolland Golden The Historic New Orleans Collection The Great Ouachita River Flood of 1932 Jazz Notes Louisiana Architecture Louisiana: Where Land Meets Water Louisiana State Museum Through A Lens Sharply: An Interview with Michael Lewis MR-GO: A “miracle” mired in controversy Louisiana Foodways Louisiana Association of Museums New Orleans: An Autopsy Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007

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