It is a story we have all heard before in the media. A family is on vacation to an exotic destination. Soaking up the sun, exploring the local cuisine, sipping drinks with tiny umbrellas in them. And then the unexpected happens …
Saint X is a derivative of this classic tale. The night before her family is scheduled to return home from their relaxing vacation on the fictional Caribbean island of Saint X, a college-age beauty named Alison disappears. Despite a fervent manhunt, she is nowhere to be found for day … until her body is accidentally discovered in a remote cay nearby.
What unfolds from here is not, perhaps, what you may expect. Less thriller and more slow-burning mystery, Schaitkin’s debut novel skitters back and forth in time. The plotline simultaneously unravels the events leading up to Alison’s disappearance while, in the present day, her younger sister, Claire obsesses over learning what really happened so many years before. Interspersed throughout, the reader is also given glimpses through the eyes of various supporting characters – a handsome young college student who was also vacationing on Saint X, two resort employees who had more than a passing acquaintance with Alison, and an ex-boyfriend, to name a few.
Touted as an exploration of family and grief, race and privilege, Saint X attempts to blend the weighty topics often found in literary fiction with a more mainstream storyline. The result: a story that feels disconnected and, at times, superfluous. The narrative returns time and again to issues of privilege, however these moments feel forced, disjointed, and uncomfortable.
With this said, Schaitkin undeniably possesses some sharp writing skills. Sentences and passages throughout were well-written, carefully crafted, with a clear and engaging voice. Big picture, however, this reader felt detached from the perhaps overly lengthy narrative and themes that the author undertakes here.
Saint X is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers as of February 18th 2020. Thanks to Celadon Books for gifting me an advance copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions expressed here are entirely my own.
Alexis Schaitkin’s debut novel, Saint X, is forthcoming from Celadon Books on February 18th, 2020, with seven foreign language editions to follow. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Ecotone, Southwest Review, The Southern Review, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Her fiction has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She received her MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and son.
Will you be picking up Saint X? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
Hailed as a “marvel of a book” and “brilliant and unflinching,” Alexis Schaitkin’s stunning debut Saint X is a haunting portrait of grief, obsession, and the bond between two sisters never truly given the chance to know one another.
Claire is only seven years old when her college-age sister, Alison, disappears on the last night of their family vacation at a resort on the Caribbean island of Saint X. Several days later, Alison’s body is found in a remote spot on a nearby cay, and two local men―employees at the resort―are arrested. But the evidence is slim, the timeline against it, and the men are soon released. The story turns into national tabloid news, a lurid mystery that will go unsolved. For Claire and her parents, there is only the return home to broken lives.
Years later, Claire is living and working in New York City when a brief but fateful encounter brings her together with Clive Richardson, one of the men originally suspected of murdering her sister. It is a moment that sets Claire on an obsessive pursuit of the truth―not only to find out what happened the night of Alison’s death but also to answer the elusive question: Who exactly was her sister? At seven, Claire had been barely old enough to know her: a beautiful, changeable, provocative girl of eighteen at a turbulent moment of identity formation.
As Claire doggedly shadows Clive, hoping to gain his trust, waiting for the slip that will reveal the truth, an unlikely attachment develops between them, two people whose lives were forever marked by the same tragedy.
For readers of Emma Cline’s The Girls and Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, Saint X is a flawlessly drawn and deeply moving story that culminates in an emotionally powerful ending.
