By Edmund White (2020)
I’ve been meaning to read some Edmund White for a while – given that White got a very rare enthusiastic recommendation from my favourite writer. Amusingly, for a long time I confused him with E.B. White, creator of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little – they are emphatically not the same guy!
I definitely enjoyed this, the immersion into unfamiliar worlds is very well done – I partly like all the technicalities on practically how saints are made.
It’s literary and gripping. So far, it’s the story of two sisters growing up in oil-rich Texas in the 70s, one very much heading for the debuntante high-life, and the other a sort of Texan Simone Weil, becoming a saintly figure starving herself in sympathy with those suffering in Mexico. It’s slightly racier than the non-fiction I’ve been reading…
I definitely enjoyed this, the immersion into unfamiliar worlds is very well done – I partly like all the technicalities on practically how saints are made.
I did get a slight feeling in the middle of sagging into picturesque gossip (one review described it as a “romp” and White has characterised himself as “an archeologist of gossip”) and have been wondering if there’s more to it. There’s obviously the reflection of the author’s divided vision of himself: as an ascetic and aesthete, and the theme of twins and doublings runs right through it.
But I can’t help get the sneaking feeling that there’s another very strange undercurrent (and reading a little more White I can’t believe there’s not more going on). One theme – the passing down of neglect and abuse between generations – is played out in a rather obvious fashion. But an “event” that happens at the end is simultaneously so shocking, and so brushed over, it makes us seriously doubt the (otherwise very self-aware) narrator, Yvette. Has she actually been unreliable throughout? After all, the book ends on her re-writing her dead sister’s letters in her candidate for sainthood.
I’m still not sure about this, but if so, it’s remarkably subtly done, and brings a creeping sense of evil quite at odds with the jaunty prose.