57 pages • 1 hour read
Saint X
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Themes
The Evolution of Grief Over Time
Over the course of the novel, many characters close to Alison grapple with her death, and the various impacts of this loss evolve over many years. For Claire, grief evolves unpredictably, and her grieving process only becomes clear in retrospect.
From the time Alison’s body is found, through the next few months, Claire’s understanding of the loss comes in waves. At the resort, she cannot comprehend the loss:
Mere days ago, my sister had rubbed aloe on my sunburned skin. If I concentrated on the memory, I could still feel her fingertips. Now I was shedding that skin. Soon there would be nothing left of me that she had touched (45).
In this moment, Claire’s shedding skin represents loss that can’t ever be regained, reflecting her nascent understanding that Alison is gone for good—an understanding that expands when she goes on a trip to Paris with her aunt Caroline. While there, she realizes that Alison “was not gone just from me and my parents […], but also and above all from herself” (51). Here, a new layer of tragedy reveals itself to Claire, and this leads her to fixate on the ways in which her life would be different had Alison not died.
In Claire’s college years and adulthood, the impact of her sister’s death becomes complicated by several factors, such as social dynamics and self-criticism. In Chapter 2, Claire begins to fantasize about the fame this loss might bring her, and though she is “ashamed of these fantasies,” she is “helpless to stop them” (56). In college, she agonizes over whether and when to tell boyfriends about her sister, asking, “To what extent was my pain a thing I cultivated, a thing I used?” (59). This experience is mirrored with less self-reflection later in the book when Alison’s high school boyfriend explains, “With time, [Alison’s death] stopped being this guilty conscience or this barrier or whatever she was. She became a way of…opening up, I guess” (221). Drew finds that when he shares this trauma with his partners, it allows them to share something hidden as well, and while he doesn’t seize on this as a manipulative tactic, it seems notable that when he meets the woman he will marry, he makes the decision not to tell her for a long time.
During the winter in New York, in which most of Claire’s character arc takes place, her experience of grief changes dramatically. During this time, it evolves from something that she inflicts upon herself to something that she cannot control. In New York, she says, “Sometimes I thought I saw Alison. […] The Alisons darted. They slipped around corners. They were there and not there. They were always teenagers” (66). Claire also dreams of her sister several times, and these moments in the book reflect the ways that Claire’s grief disrupts and imposes itself on her life.
One significant marker of how grief evolves in Claire is how she perceives and judges her parents over time. While Claire becomes obsessed with uncovering Alison’s true identity in life, she interprets her parents’ form of mourning as denial and fantasy: “When they spoke of her, it was not to reminisce about the past, but to imagine her into the present” (88). This contrasts with the way Claire interacts with the photos that her father took on the trip to Saint X: “At first, I went to the photographs when I missed my sister. As time passed, I went to them when I had not missed her in a while and wanted to” (54). In adulthood, Claire increasingly lives in the past, not only to get to the truth, but to experience the loss of her sister anew. Her parents, on the other hand, have made a conscious attempt to let the past go. It is not until the penultimate chapter that Claire empathizes with how her parents have decided to cope, and this signals a huge internal shift for Claire herself, in which she finds closure.
Awareness of Privilege, Class, and Race
Considerations of privilege, class, and race permeate the experiences of many characters in Saint X. From the first chapter, an omniscient narrator enters the perspectives of several guests at Indigo Bay, revealing the ways in which they grapple with their privilege. Waking up the first morning of their vacation, a father looks down at the beach, which had been pristine the day before:
He notices now that the sand, which was immaculate yesterday, is strewn with mats of brown seaweed. Two men in overalls are raking the seaweed into piles. The tractor follows after them, scooping up the piles. Behind the tractor, a fourth man uses a push broom to smooth away the tread marks (13).
This character has a complex reaction to the realization that much invisible labor goes into providing him with a luxurious vacation experience. The father has just been thinking about how “fortunate” he is to be able to visit such a beautiful place, and this new observation seems to disrupt this gratitude, “[tainting] his enjoyment.” However, he is bothered by his own reaction, self-conscious of his discontent in always finding something wrong with these places, which are meant to be paradises. “He likes to think he wears his affluence tastefully,” the narrator asserts, as the father does not complain about small inconveniences at the resort. And yet, he says, “It is easy to make allowances when you live a fortunate life.” Essentially, he is trying to figure out how to both embrace the perks of affluence while behaving in a way that does not make him just another rich jerk, oblivious of those around him.
Claire struggles similarly when she moves to Flatbush, where she is a gentrifier. Here, Claire has a younger take on the father’s preoccupation with class and white privilege, as she’s more aware of the societal and institutional systems in place that marginalize people of color and those of lower socioeconomic status. Nevertheless, she is guilty of the same performance of empathy and the same self-consciousness of her own privilege. She explains: “I admit I was rather impressed with myself for living in a building where I was one of the only white tenants” (64), yet she is terrified of revealing how removed she really is from the world in which she inhabits. This is illustrated in a scene in which she orders food from the Little Sweet for the first time:
I wanted to pick something quickly and confidently, but with the exception of jerk chicken, the items were mysterious to me, and I was determined not to order jerk chicken, which I was certain would mark me as a rube. […] As I scanned the menu, I could feel my face heating up and Vincia’s eyes on me, and sensed (or perhaps imagined) her annoyance. Oxtails dinner. Doubles. Festivals. Sea moss. Peanut punch. ‘I guess I’d better trust the expert,’ I said finally, smiling at Clive (174).
Clive has his own awareness of the privilege around him, most significantly in the scene in which he finds himself outside of the city in an affluent neighborhood. While he was patient with the cluelessness of the guests at Indigo Bay when he takes in the realities of what their lives must have consisted of, particularly in comparison to his own, he pointedly sees the differences between them as injustices. Specifically, in his experiences as a taxi driver, he observes how it’s not just class that separates him from affluent society but race as well. He notes that white women in his cab who clutch their purses while smiling at him “did not trust him, but they also did not want to appear distrustful” (260).
Claire tries to confront this attitude head-on as she imagines Alison’s experience on Saint X. When Alison discovers Clive and Edwin together, she is ashamed at her own vision of what she wants for that night: “their black skin against her white skin, the night a souvenir to remind her who she has the capacity to be” (321). Though Claire has engaged in behavior herself that betrays a naivete about her white privilege, it is in this moment that she is able to place a finger firmly on this experience. Perhaps it is easiest for Claire to identify the ways in which white privilege influences behavior when she is inhabiting her sister’s perspective.
Fractured Identities
Claire is on a search for answers to the riddle of her sister’s death, and she believes that a large piece of that puzzle lies in understanding Alison’s true self. Claire attempts to find this through reading articles that came out after Alison’s death, by speaking to a college friend of Alison’s, and by listening to Alison’s audio diary entries. The book itself endeavors to uncover pieces of Alison’s identity as well through the confessional passages that close many chapters of the book. Altogether, these sources and testimonies form a kaleidoscopic vision of Alison Thomas. But the question remains: Who was Alison really? The more accounts Claire sees, the more impossible it is for her to answer this question, pointing to a frustrating reality that it is impossible to piece together a whole person from the observations of others.
Even Alison’s diary entries, which would seem to be the most promising evidence of Alison’s true motivations, prove to be misleading. Claire begins to understand that in these entries, Alison presents a particular version of herself, and may even rewrite the events of her life and her feelings about those events. Though Claire doesn’t necessarily consider the entries to be lies, she sees how Alison complicates the truth in her self-reporting:
I think it would be more accurate to say that truth and untruth were present in Alison’s diary as hydrogen and oxygen are present in water. The challenge is not one of separation—for what use are either hydrogen or oxygen in understanding the nature of water? I had to find a way to understand how truth and untruth make each other (88).
In this metaphor, Claire sets out an even more challenging goal for herself—a synthesis of realities that is, arguably, impossible.
Alison is not the only character whose identity is fragmented. Claire herself splits into two versions: Claire, the strange girl who depended on the care of her older sister, and Emily, the person who emerged after Alison’s death. She often speaks of leading “another life” in a speculative world in which Alison is still alive.
As Claire becomes fixated on her pursuit for the truth, the old version of herself, which she believed she’d cast off, returns. Claire begins to fall back into her old compulsive behaviors, and begins to inhabit the memories she had as a child. She dreams of Alison, and in that dream, she is her old self, revealing that her identity may not have truly fragmented the way she felt it had.
Claire believes that a person’s identity can be split into parts, and she needs this to be true in order to discover who her sister really was. This belief plays out with Clive, as she both follows him from afar and tries to get to know him as a friend. In order to be close to this person who she suspects may have killed her sister, she must compartmentalize what she perceives to be disparate pieces of him: “I had to exert tremendous mental energy to convince myself that the man before me was not the same man Alison had known, simply to bear being near him” (246). Eventually, Claire believes that she has effectively compartmentalized the part of Clive capable of violence. However, she comes to understand that this was a construct that she created, feeding into the story that she needed to discover about Alison’s death.
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