“Saint X” by Alexis Schaitken

NIGHTSTANDS & COFFEE TABLES
REVIEW BY MEREDITH MCKINNIE

“Sometimes I thought I saw Allison. She picked up a box of cereal in the Flatbush Co-op. She jogged past me in Prospect Park. She slipped into a taxi in the rain. The Allisons darted. They slipped around corners. They were there and not there. They were always teenagers.”

Saint X island for a winter vacation. Claire is only seven-years-old, and Allison is a freshman in college. Claire is only beginning to find her place in the world, and Allison is a decade into resenting hers. When Allison goes missing the day before the family’s departure home, the island is in a frenzy trying to locate the white tourist, hushing the rumors for fear of devastating the island’s lifeblood, tourism; and trying to appease the white parents who demand answers about their daughter. When Allison’s body is found several days later on a nearby island, two local boys are immediately arrested, though later released for lack of evidence. When the family returns to New York, the parents spend years trying to uncover the truth, and Claire struggles to fill her dead sister’s shoes. A chance encounter in a taxi cab fifteen years later resurfaces the memory of the sister Claire hardly knew. “We don’t know what people look like. We only know what they look like to us. We have an idea of them, shaped by our affections, our memories, but this is the real distortion.” Claire is determined to discover what happened to her sister and forms a relationship with one of the original suspects. The journey forces Claire to face who she thought her sister was with whom she now knows her to have been. 

Schaitken’s book explores familial relationships, grief, sibling rivalry, class, race, and the role of community. The cover and plot synopsis leads readers to expect a page-turning thriller, but this is not meant to thrill anyone. This book makes you think. Rather than a whodunit novel, this is a reconsideration of the whodunit genre, more like a what it did to me. The story becomes less about Allison’s disappearance and more about whom Allison left behind. While everyone else in her family wants to forget Allison existed, Claire wants to know what she was too young to understand. “If I’ve learned anything it’s that you can have a pretty decent life without unpacking life’s mysteries.” Allison’s ghost, so to speak, is the dominant character, as everything Claire says and does is a reaction to her sister’s absence. Schaitken writes detailed descriptions of the fictional island; the first ten pages describe an aerial view of the vegetation. The plot is simple, but the effect on the characters is immense and extends well outside the immediate family. Schaitken writes thoughtfully about teenage angst and introspection and shows the reality of trying to cope and/or striving to forget.