Edmund White “A Saint from Texas”

Several kinds of novels in one, Edmund White’s “A Saint from Texas” is so good you might forget a novel can be this good. Beginning as a comic American novel set in Texas, the heroines are twin-sisters, and one moves to Paris, another enters a convent. What’s explored is the gap between a human as guided primarily by carnal impulses, and a human as a holy spirit—similarities and dissimilarities. White says the only thing the sisters have in common is they feel remote within themselves. This is the kind of writing we need if we don’t even know it.

An excerpt from “A Saint from Texas,” by Edmund White.

For my spring semester abroad I arrived at the big old-fashioned apartment of Pauline’s grandmother on the Avenue Mozart (she’d taught me to say “Moh-Zar,” not “Moht-zart” as we pronounce it—correctly, I might add) with seventeen pieces of luggage and an extra taxi. For the door on the ground floor Pauline had given me the “code,” whatever that was. I saw a panel with some numbers and punched them and wedged my hat box in the heavy wood door, lacquered teal blue and adorned with a heavy round brass knocker. Though I’d tipped them extravagantly the drivers had just dumped my bags on the sidewalk. I moved them all into the big entrance hall to the building of rather dirty black and white tiles and smelling of fish (cod, as I later learned, since the concierge was Portuguese and ate nothing but bacalao). She looked suspiciously out through her lace-curtained window and disappeared. Wasn’t it her job to help me? The elevator was big enough for only two people. I decided to haul everything up in three trips to the fifth floor and the entrance to Mme de Castiglione’s apartment (in French with two ps, appartement). When I got everything up there I sat on my suitcase for three minutes till I stopped perspiring, then rang her bell. I didn’t expect her to hug me exactly, but I did expect her to greet me in slow but precise French with a formality and a certain warmth. Instead she looked at my mountain of matching Vuitton luggage, put her hands on her hips, and snarled, “Mais non! C’est impossible! Vous exaggerez, ma chère. You have rented only a chambre de bonne, a maid’s room one floor up, and you can never fit all that—”

A Saint from Texas Copyright© 2020 by Elizabeth Wetmore. Reprinted courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing.