57 pages • 1 hour read
Alexis SchaitkinSaint X
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 2-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “Emily of Pasadena”
Chapter 2 is written in the first-person perspective of Claire, years after Alison’s death. Looking back on the week of Alison’s death, Claire remembers her parents being consumed with worry, at times neglecting Claire’s basic needs while also becoming protective of her. Before Alison’s body is found in the waterfall on Faraway Cay, Claire is unconcerned, convinced that Alison is playing some “elaborate game” (41). Once Alison’s body is found, however, Claire finally feels the enormity of her loss: “I was an only child now, hopelessly insufficient” (45).
Claire lays out the facts as she knows them, notably including the fact that at 10:15 p.m., Alison left with Clive and Edwin in Edwin’s car—the same eggplant-colored car Claire had seen before. Witnesses said that Alison, Edwin, and Clive were at a local bar called Paulette’s Place until 12:45 a.m. At 1:30 a.m., Clive and Edwin were pulled over. Officer Roy drove them to the jail to sober up, and the next morning, they went to work at Indigo Bay as usual.
Claire imagines how Alison ended up at Faraway Cay. In one scenario, Clive and Edwin are sinister characters who rape and kill her, then throw her clothes into the water as they take a boat back to the main island. In another, Alison drowns by accident, and Clive and Edwin panic, ultimately deciding to hide her in the cay.
The police investigation continues after the Thomas family returns home to New York. It is determined that Clive and Edwin could not have made it to Faraway Cay with Alison before being pulled over that night, so they are released. Claire’s parents continue to spiral, and Claire experiences an intensification of her compulsive behavior (drawing words with her finger), and she develops obsessive thoughts that keep her up all night.
For Claire’s eighth birthday, her parents surprise her with a trip to Paris with her aunt Caroline. When she returns home, her parents seem composed again, and they return to their old routines. The following summer, the family moves to a small bungalow in a nice neighborhood in Pasadena, California. When Claire starts school, she decides to start going by her middle name, Emily.
Claire summarizes years of her life while highlighting significant moments. When she is 10, a true-crime series on TV covers Alison’s story, which the Thomas family avoids watching. Claire, now going by Emily, becomes much more social than she used to be, and she acknowledges that this transformation was only possible because of Alison’s death.
When Claire goes to college, she grapples with sharing her personal tragedy with the boys she dates, noticing that they treat her differently after learning about her sister. Despite this, she describes her college experience as typical, and after she graduates, she moves to New York City along with her college friend, Jackie, and gets a job as an assistant to an editor who specializes in murder mysteries and thrillers. Eventually she moves into a basement studio by herself, which sits on the edge of Flatbush, a Caribbean neighborhood, making her one of the few white people in the area. Claire looks back on how oblivious she was at “the darker currents that must have been there all along” (66), foreshadowing a major turn of events at the end of the chapter.
One day on her way to work, Claire notices that her taxi driver is named Clive Richardson. Recognizing this name from her time on Saint X, she impulsively slips her phone under the driver’s seat before getting out of the cab.
At the end of this chapter, the narrative shifts to the perspective of the man in the dolphin swim trunks, who vacationed at Indigo Bay the same week as the Thomas family. He reveals that Alison’s death caused a rift in his relationship with his wife that never healed.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Islands”
Chapter 3 shifts to Clive’s perspective, using third person. Clive is now a taxi driver in New York City, living in a crowded shared apartment. He dwells on how strange it is that he lives on an island that feels nothing like the one he comes from: “He misses the water so much his bones ache with longing. Yet it is, ironically, all around him” (75). Clive often imagines how differently his life could have played out but does not specify the alternative.
Though Clive is supposed to surrender items left in the cab to the garage, he collects them, knowing the men who run the garage will likely just sell them anyway. He thinks of himself as “rescuing these things from the careless people who have forgotten them” (73), but he also questions his own motives and feeling of self-righteousness.
Most recently, someone has left an iPhone under the driver’s seat. He imagines to whom it might belong, thinking of the carelessness and casual privilege of many of his passengers. He has returned items like this to their owners before and wonders if he really is a good person, or if he just wants people to perceive him as such. The chapter ends with the phone ringing, and Clive hears the ring as the “banana song,” the same one they would sing on the beach with the guests at Indigo Bay. He dismisses this as a strange coincidence.
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Little Sweet”
Chapter 4 returns to Claire’s first-person perspective. Claire has just left her phone in Clive’s cab, and is preoccupied by this impulsive decision while at work. Later, she calls her phone from a payphone, and when Clive answers, Claire discovers that they live in the same neighborhood. Clive suggests they meet at the Little Sweet, a Caribbean restaurant nearby. When Claire arrives, she recognizes him immediately, but does not say anything. She introduces herself as Emily.
That night, Claire dreams of Alison on the beach. She tells Claire, “Don’t tell,” before the dream ends. The next day at work, Claire researches her sister’s death. She finds Alison’s obituary, which paints Alison inaccurately, and she watches Dying for Fun: Alison Thomas, the true-crime TV special that aired the year Alison died.
Throughout this time, Claire (as Emily) walks to the Little Sweet every night and watches Clive in his dinner routine. She decides that she’ll start looking for answers by piecing together who Alison was and continuing to surveil Clive. She keeps this pursuit a secret from her parents.
The section that appears at the end of this chapter comes from Selena Richter, the actress who plays Alison in Dying for Fun. She recounts the abusive treatment she receives in Hollywood from both the public and people in the industry. She suffered particularly abusive treatment from the director of Dying for Fun, in which she argued that during the rape scene, Alison would never say to “Apollo,” “Don’t you dare be gentle with me.” As punishment, the director makes her act out this scene dozens of times.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Our Beautiful Daughter”
Claire continues her research, attempting to piece together who her sister was and the events leading to her death. The chapter contains excerpts from sources such as newspaper articles and the official autopsy report. These sources represent varying opinions of who Alison was, with quotes from peers, family members, and a high school teacher. Claire calls Nika Ivanova, Alison’s roommate at Princeton. When they talk, Nika describes the significant role Alison played in her life, but Claire is dissatisfied by Nika’s story.
Claire continues to walk to the Little Sweet every evening to watch Clive, and she sees that his routine never wavers. She misses one of these nights because her friend Jackie asks to meet her for girl talk at a bar. Claire goes, but is irritated by this distraction.
In Alison’s autopsy report, Claire reads that Alison’s immediate cause of death could not be determined. This report is followed by a statement from the Saint X chief of police, which explains that there is not sufficient evidence to conclude that Alison’s death was a result of a violent crime. Claire finds the statement her parents put out in response, which adamantly rejects this conclusion.
One night when Emily is watching Clive thought the Little Sweet’s window, she decides to follow him. When Clive arrives at his door, she yells “Gogo,” his nickname from the island, and hides before he can spot her. Clive yells back, telling whoever is there to leave him alone before hurrying inside.
Chapters 2-5 Analysis
Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the theme of Awareness of Privilege, Class, and Race. In Chapter 2, the tragedy of Alison’s death results in a new self-consciousness in the Thomas family. When Claire and her parents move across the country to start over, Claire describes her family’s new home in Pasadena as “decidedly, intentionally, modest” (53). Claire’s mother begins to call status symbols “tacky,” and Claire interprets this new insistence on modesty as a form of self-protection, as though Alison’s death was a result of the family displaying their wealth.
The second chapter also reveals how Claire conceptualizes her own privilege. While Claire is living in Flatbush, she is aware of her whiteness and privilege, thinking she is “a gentrifier but, […] an unobtrusive one” (64). Now she realizes that she did not move there out of necessity but as a form of “whimsical elective poverty,” as she received a regular allowance from her parents (65). Like her parents, Claire tried to efface her privilege after Alison’s death, though it’s not clear if this is from grief, guilt, or some other reason.
Clive represents the opposite side of this equation. He is one of the immigrants who lives Flatbush as well, and is therefore one of the neighbors that Claire tries so hard not to bother. Unlike Claire, Clive lives where he does because it’s what he can afford and the population represents his community. He misses home intensely while Claire describes her life as “unencumbered” (65). However, despite coming from vastly different circumstances, the two characters live similarly isolated existences: Clive “comes and goes like a ghost” (75) while Claire wants to “inhabit this building, borough, world, life, without casting out ripples” (65).
The respective impacts of Alison’s death on the lives of Clive and Claire are also described similarly, highlighting the theme of Fractured Identities. Alison’s death creates a “what if” effect for both characters whereby they imagine what their lives would have been like if her death had not occurred. When Claire is a teenager and has sex for the first time, she realizes, “If Alison were alive, it would not have happened at all. There was another life I might have been living” (57). At the end of Chapter 3, Clive dwells on a similar feeling: “There is another life he lives. It flows beneath this one” (77). Though the two characters express similar experiences, their present-day lives remain in contrast: Clive lost the life he wanted because of Alison’s death while Claire gained a life she could not have achieved had Alison not died.
In Chapters 4 and 5, Claire becomes set on two tasks: to closely surveil Clive in order to understand who he is, and to uncover as much as she can about her sister. As she finds articles and other materials about Alison and her death, she is forced to reconcile the many different versions of Alison that exist in the minds of those who knew her, developing the theme of Fractured Identity. In an article from a Princeton University newspaper, where Alison had just completed her freshman year, fellow students say Alison stood out as an exemplary student and dancer; an excerpt from a New York Times includes quotes from Claire and Alison’s aunt Colleen that adamantly reject the idea that Alison was a party girl. A local New York paper quotes Becca Frankel, a girl who went to high school with Alison, and Becca paints Alison as someone who “loved” (100) attention from boys. These impressions are subjective and represent what these people want or need Alison to be: “Alison was a drama queen. She was a gentle soul. She was that girl. The one everybody envied. The one all the boys wanted. A star. She was what all the dead are: whatever the living make them” (102).
Claire discovers that two photographs of Alison come up again and again. One is of Alison dancing in a high school recital, looking angelic; the other shows her dressed scantily, dancing and drinking at a party during her freshman year of college. In both photographs, Alison becomes an archetype of the “pretty dead white girl” (91), which highlights the Awareness of Privilege, Class, and Race.
But not all of these manipulations of Alison’s identity reflect a desire to make Alison into an archetype. Alison’s obituary, which Claire believes was written by her father, simplifies Alison in a way that surprises Claire, and reveals how grief can necessitate painting the dead differently than they really were. This highlights the theme of The Evolution of Grief Over Time. When Claire reads the obituary, she finds that it mentions Alison’s “aspirations toward a career in medicine” (87). Claire has no recollection of this specific goal and suspects that her father fabricated this detail to make grieving her death more manageable: “To mourn a budding physician was a terrible task, but it was a thing you could do. To mourn a girl with infinite futures was to mourn infinitely” (88). Having changed her own story somewhat, Claire sympathizes with the need to manipulate a story in order to process grief.
Dying for Fun depicts the part of the “pretty dead white girl” trope in which Alison’s death is her own fault. The series depicts Alison as a voluptuous ingenue taken in by an obvious trap. Edwin and Clive are represented by “Apollo,” a “blatantly evil” (90) rapacious Black man, who murders Alison on the beach after they have sex. Apollo is also a Caribbean stereotype, with dreadlocks, a gold hoop earring, and an overdone accent. While Claire recognizes all of these details as problematic, she gets sucked into the series, watching every episode of Dying for Fun over the next week. She wonders about the appeal of “the pretty dead white girls. […] You find them naive and smug. Maybe they are. Maybe Alison was” (91-92). She is disdainful of these stories while perhaps feeling a need for their straightforward answers.
