Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, I'm happy to have, as my guest, Edmund White, whose new novel, A Saint from Texas, took me over.

It really amazed me.

It's several kinds of novel in one.

It begins as an American comic novel set in Texas. Its heroines are two twin sisters, identical twins. One of them

moves to Paris to be part of the world of brilliant, frivolous speech and fashion, the other of them becomes a nun.

She's serious about religion, and the book, in a sense, is examining the gap between the human being as a meat animal and the human being as a Holy Spirit.

Is that a significant gap for you, Edmund? It doesn't strike me as being like you.

Well, I was always an atheist, but I've always been intrigued by religion, and I called myself a mystical atheist, whatever that is.

And so in this book, while I was planning it, I realized I was going to write about the Baroness,

but then I thought, oh, I've written so much about Paris frivolous Paris,

that I should write about something serious, like,

what about a saint, and that's something I know nothing about?

So I read tons of devotional literature and really tried to get into the mind of a saint.

You not only get into the mind of a saint, you get into her mind via the mind of her unsaithely identical twin sister,

...