A Saint from Texas
by Edmund White
(Bloomsbury, $33)
Reviewed by David Herkt
Appearing almost effortless, Edmund White's novel A Saint from Texas is a buoyant and joyous delight. It is White's 29th book and the hand of a skilled writer is apparent everywhere in this audacious story of identical twin girls
from Texas who are destined for very divergent futures - one as a sexually adventurous Parisian aristocrat, the other as a possible future Roman Catholic saint.
True wit is rare in the age of the Twitterati, when smart-arse is generally the name of the game, but White demonstrates how much real experience, a broad field of reference, and skilful phrase-making can make something sublime. A Saint from Texas is both sophisticated and laugh-out-loud – but it contains more than just superficial entertainment.
Yvonne and Yvette have been born to a dirt-patch, multimillionaire oil-magnate in Texas. This is Dallas with a capital-D, raw, brash, tasteless, and with money to burn – green Pontiac cars, extravagant pool parties, a place where someone can happily buy an original Louis XVI chair, commission a set of new oversize replicas of it and junk the original because it is tatty.
The twins receive aspirational schooling at Texas U with its sororities ("We were all white and blonde in those days") and boys whose minds seemed set only on what lies within wired brassieres. But the sisters have already embarked upon quite different lives.
While Yvonne dates a string of young men, Yvette plunges into religious studies and conducts her first possible miracle, saving the life of a young Mexican boy after a car accident. Yvonne's destiny, however, will be in fashionable, aristocratic Paris, while Yvette's will be taking voluntary poverty in a convent in Colombia.
