While White’s novel is a comedy of manners-the multiple, ongoing culture clashes are laugh-aloud funny-it is also a deep dive into character. Yvette is revealed through her twin sister’s eyes, her only direct contribution to the story coming in epistolary form as she writes to Yvonne about her life in the Colombian convent.

In this comedy of manners, White immediately subsumes the reader in time and place, his distinctive voice claiming us from the first page, leaving me chuckling, shaking my head in admiration.Ī Saint from Texas is told in a first-person narration by Yvonne, as she looks back from the future. The sisters’ lives diverge profoundly as Yvonne remains in France, marrying into the aristocracy, and Yvette travels to a Colombian convent, devoting herself to a life of service.Ī Saint from Texas is the new novel from living literary legend Edmund White, a giant in American letters, celebrated in international literary circles, and a pioneer in LGBTQ literature. Yvette shrinks from the materialism and prejudice of Dallas society, instead embracing an ascetic Catholicism she, too, enrolls at UT, and it is in Austin that Yvette is credited with her first miracle.

Yvonne, outgoing and audacious, embraces her new life, making her debut and going on to a sorority at the University of Texas at Austin and a semester abroad in Paris. In sleepy 1950s Ranger, Texas, twin sisters Yvonne and Yvette have their lives upended when their mother dies, and their father, who made his money in oil, remarries a “fancy lady” named Bobbie Jean who wasn’t going to live in an old house “with swamp coolers instead of ceiling fans.” Bobbie Jean is ambitious soon the family has moved into a mansion in the Turtle Creek area of Dallas, and the twins are introduced to the Hockaday School, the tearoom at Neiman Marcus, and society debuts.

A previous life edmund white review