57 pages • 1 hour read
Saint X
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Chapters 11-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary: “Sara”
Chapter 11 returns to Clive’s perspective. Clive considers the ways in which his building and neighborhood in New York City have changed over the years, with more white people moving in. He sees Claire (or Emily) the same way he sees the other white people around him and wonders what her motivations are in becoming his friend.
The narrative then turns to when Clive is 17, the year that he graduates from secondary school. His friends are going to college or getting jobs, while Edwin gets Clive involved in half-baked business schemes. At night they drink and spend the night sobering up in jail after getting pulled over by Officer Roy.
When Clive is 19, Edwin pushes him to talk to Sara while they are all at the Carnival parade. Clive walks Sara home and sees that her home life is dysfunctional, but he doesn’t judge her. Sara leads him to the back shed, where they have sex, and two months later, Sara tells Clive that she’s pregnant. This leads to a transformation of Clive’s relationship with his grandmother: When she voices her disapproval of Sara, Clive defends her, and from this point on, his grandmother stops trying to manage Clive’s life.
Edwin gets himself and Clive steady jobs at Indigo Bay, and Clive starts researching how to prepare for a baby. But Sara goes into labor three weeks early, and Clive misses it because he’s out drinking with Edwin. When he visits Sara in the hospital, she doesn’t want to speak to him.
The confessional passage at the end of this chapter comes from Sara Lycott, who talks about her contentious home life with her mother. The day that she went to the Carnival parade, Sara had yelled at her mother until her voice was hoarse. She dressed more scantily than usual, and left the house still feeling angry. When Clive came up to her, she saw it as an opportunity to take control of her own life, “and spoil it before it could disappoint me […]. Though in the end, the cost would be more than I could have imagined” (237).
Chapter 12 Summary: “The Secret City”
Winter is underway, and Claire has become dependent on her dinners with Clive. She thinks about him all the time, and when she’s not with him, a feeling of dread sets in. She fantasizes about scenarios in which he’ll be compelled to confide in her about Alison’s death. One evening, he mentions Faraway Cay. Claire remembers from the novels she reads for work that murderers often return to the crime scene, and she wonders if this is Clive’s way of doing that.
At work, Claire’s boss is concerned about her. She has noticed how behind Claire is, but still hesitantly assigns her a manuscript to edit.
Claire tells her parents that she can’t go to Pasadena for Christmas because she’s met someone, and they’re going to spend the holiday together in New York. On Christmas Eve, Claire finds Clive at the Little Sweet. They go for a walk, and Claire presses Clive about why he hasn’t ever returned home.
Later, Claire dreams that she’s riding in Clive’s taxi through New York City, but the streets look like Saint X. She understands that this is a secret city beneath New York. Alison crosses the street in front of the cab and lingers in front of it, not letting them pass. On the anniversary of Alison’s death, Claire follows Clive on a long walk to Manhattan Beach, where Clive stands on the shore eating a candy bar.
The confessional passage at the end of this chapter comes from Sara Lycott’s mother, Agatha. Agatha recounts how she moved to Saint X with her daughter when she was 17 and Sara was four months old. Once there, she attempted to create a new life for the two of them. She told people her last name was Lycott instead of Hodge, and told everyone a fabricated story about her husband being a government minister who died in an automobile accident. Eventually, though, people caught on to her lies. She blames herself for Sara going out, finding Clive, and getting pregnant. She sees this as Sara continuing a legacy of tragedy.
Chapter 13 Summary: “Snow”
Once Clive is released from the Saint X prison, he becomes a pariah in the community. Even though he was serving time for a drug-possession charge, everyone associates him with Alison’s death, and Sara doesn’t want him around their son.
Clive doesn’t want to leave home, but he moves to New York City in the hopes that he can return one day and have the life and family he desires. Not wanting to run into people from home, he avoids the Bronx and instead finds a crowded, shared apartment in Flatbush, the largest Caribbean neighborhood in the city. After three months, Clive earns his hack license and begins driving cabs at night.
During his first December in New York, Clive picks up a man who lives far outside of the city. After dropping him at his home, Clive sees snow fall for the very first time. Seeing how beautiful and affluent the area is, Clive feels anger at the realization of how privileged people like Alison and the other guests at Indigo Bay really were.
Winter in New York is particularly hard on Clive. He is surrounded by others who have left home with similar hopes as him, and who are slowly forced to let go of their intentions to return. Clive wires money to Sara every month, but she is hostile on the phone with him.
A few winters later, Clive falls ill and loses out on work, falls behind on rent, and has to pause his payments to Sara. His roommate, Sachin, then accuses him of stealing his stash of cash, which has gone missing from under his mattress. After Sachin initiates a physical fight with Clive, Clive has to find a new place to live. Once he’s back to work, he calls Sara to let her know, and she then tells him that she’s gotten married to Edwin.
The confessional passage at the end of this chapter comes from Berline, or Bery, Wilson. In it, she talks about her artwork, which consists of large sculptures she puts around the city, often as homages to her home and upbringing. She says that her next project is called Faraway Woman, which is inspired by the Saint X folktale and will be installed on Governors Island.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Starlight”
Claire interprets Clive’s “pilgrimage” to Manhattan Beach on the anniversary of Alison’s death as an acknowledgment of wrongdoing, and she becomes determined to push Clive toward telling her everything that happened that night. She returns to the Little Sweet to talk with him again and again, but each time they have the same sort of casual conversations as always.
One day when Claire calls out sick to follow Clive, her boss discovers the manuscript Claire was supposed to edit, untouched, along with other neglected work. Claire is fired the next day. That night, she tells Clive the news, and he consoles her. Unsure of whether it’s part of her deception or not, she leans in to kiss him, but Clive leans away. Her tic comes back, and Clive briefly catches her drawing a word in the air with her finger. When she goes to get them beers, he leaves without saying goodbye.
For several nights, Clive doesn’t show up to the Little Sweet. After a week Clive comes back, and asks Claire to go for a walk. They sit on a bench, and he reveals that he’s found out who Claire really is. He’s angry. She concedes that she was the one who yelled his nickname months earlier. Clive is clearly angry, and Claire pleads with him, apologizing. When she gets up to leave, he grabs her arm and tells her to sit. He will tell her everything, and then he never wants to see her again.
The chapter breaks in the middle of this scene, and Claire thinks through her memories of her sister during the vacation to Saint X. She imagines holding on to the image of Alison in her mind forever, living inside it, but declares this impossible.
Chapters 11-14 Analysis
Chapters 11 and 13 are significant moments in the narrative for Clive’s character because he acknowledges his thoughts about both Claire and Alison more directly than he previously has in the book. These thoughts set Clive’s character in opposition to the sisters, as though they are on opposite sides of the coin within theme of Awareness of Privilege, Class, and Race. This also highlights the theme of Fractured Identities, as the line between the characters begin to blur.
Up to this point, the chapters have been alternating between Claire’s and Clive’s perspectives. Their storylines have not always remained parallel, as the narrative spends much of Clive’s chapters in his past. This means that though Claire’s evolving feelings about Clive are very clear, Clive’s experience of getting to know “Emily” is a blind spot in the narrative. In Chapter 11, Clive finally says that he “knows what this girl, Emily, is doing at the Little Sweet. After all, she’s not the only white kid who’s become a regular recently” (226). Clive has just been ruminating on the privileged passengers who get in his cab, who think of him as invisible, as well as the impact of white families moving into his neighborhood. “They are afraid,” Clive says of these families. “Not afraid that their black, foreign neighbors pose a threat to their safety, but afraid that a confrontation will mean losing the approval they feel they’ve earned” (226). Emily, he believes, has a similar motivation: to gain some kind of local clout that will make her feel less self-conscious about her privilege.
His assessment of Alison in Chapter 13 is not dissimilar to this, but since it arrives earlier in Clive’s life in New York, it comes from a place that is less jaded, and angrier. When Clive drives the affluent passenger to his home outside the city, Clive looks around the large houses and peaceful, snowy landscape and realizes the Alison was just like all the other tourists: “All the vacationers who went on and on about how beautiful his island was, how lucky he was to live there, how jealous they were. What bullshit. They had this” (262-63). Just as he’s lumped Claire in with the other white gentrifiers of his New York neighborhood, he lumps Alison in with all the visitors of Saint X. Later in the book, when Clive recounts the week of Alison’s death, it’s revealed that this anger was not something he often felt when dealing with the guests at Indigo Bay. Now, though, his Awareness of Privilege, Class, and Race has been transformed by his experience trying to make a living in New York as an immigrant.
Clive’s and Claire’s experiences mirror each other in these chapters, providing further tension in the plot. In Chapter 11, Clive expresses feeling as though all of his passengers, whether they confide in him or ignore him, ultimately see him as “no one.” Later on, after Claire thinks that she has lost the only relationship she has left (with Clive), she begins to see herself differently: “I was not one of the city’s bright young things after all, but one of its invisibles” (282). With this realization about her own insignificance, alongside Clive’s realization at the profound impact of class, a dynamic solidifies between them in which Claire is increasingly dependent on Clive’s friendship while Clive is embittered toward Claire. These oppositional dynamics intensify when Claire leans in to kiss Clive: “I simultaneously trusted and distrusted Clive Richardson [...]. I loved him and loathed him. I wanted to destroy him and was terrified of losing him” (281).
At this point in the novel, Claire still does not know Clive very well; they have dinner together most nights, but their conversations remain on the surface. Their relationship highlights the theme of The Evolution of Grief Over Time. Claire feels increasingly linked with Clive over time because he is the one tangible reminder of Alison, the only other person in the city who knew her. As Claire’s connection with the outside world fades, her attraction to Clive grows stronger. The more difficulty Claire experiences in deciding who Alison really was, the more solid her relationship seems with Clive, even though it’s only based on surface interactions.
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