A Saint from Texas by Edmund White
Published 2020 · 83,600 words · about 6 hours at an average pace
How hard is A Saint from Texas to read?
A Saint from Texas scores 56 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
- Rich, comic vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Long, elegant sentences.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- Concrete social comedy across two continents.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Moderate.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- Twin sisters narrating in turn, each unreliable about the other.
- Symbolic density: 48 out of 100
- Sainthood and Texas oil work as paired figures.
- Ironic distance: 68 out of 100
- Sustained comic irony about both sisters.
- Resolution withholding: 52 out of 100
- The sainthood question is left deliberately open.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Alternating first persons across decades.
How A Saint from Texas is regarded
A Saint from Texas holds a literary regard score of 38 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.