Nothing Stays Buried

“There are just three big cities in the United States that are ‘story cities’—New York, of course, New Orleans, and, best of the lot, San Francisco.” The line is Frank Norris’s, but it’s better known as the epigraph of O. Henry’s “A Municipal Report” (1909), the municipality being Nashville, as if chosen to prove Norris wrong. Well, New York—of course. San Francisco I’m not so sure about. It’s better in the movies, even if Vertigo was based on a French thriller, and as for the rest of the country, Norris couldn’t have predicted how Chicago would develop, much less Los Angeles.But New Orleans is a different matter. It really is a “story city,” and not just because it too is a port with a complicated racial history, the most complicated, in the early days, of any American entrepôt. It’s the city where George Washington Cable set “The ‘Haunted House’ in Royal Street” (1889), about a mysterious French Quarter beauty in the 1830s who got so much pleasure out of torturing her slaves that even the antebellum world knew horror. It’s Kate Chopin’s city too, the home of The Awakening, and also the place where William Faulkner found his voice and then set the eeriest chapters of Absalom, Absa...