Edmund White is in an unusually jolly mood in this darkly comic satire about a pair of twin sisters from the outskirts of Dallas. It sometimes feels rather like Nancy Mitford's retelling of The Power and the Glory as we follow narrator Yvonne's shameless social climbing from forties Texas suburban nouveau-riche to Parisian gratin against the background of her sister Yvette's equally challenging and oddly parallel quest for humility and saintliness in a Colombian convent (that's "Why-von" and "Why-vet" if you're from Texas, BTW).

The set-up gives White the chance to play around with ideas about the problem of attributing "saintliness" to an actual, complex human being who has lived in the modern world, and to wonder whether the religious life doesn't involve just as much social climbing and backstabbing as more worldly careers. And also about how much rewriting and expurgation inevitably goes into any kind of biography.

But the main raison-d'être of the book is clearly to allow White to make fun of his aristocratic friends in France. It's full of ironic observations of the manners of the French upper classes, and wicked little sketches of people we would obviously recognise if we'd moved in the right circles back in the day. And a certain amount of name-dropping-with-hindsight ("Tell me about this Jacqueline Bouvier." — "She's nobody."). I particularly enjoyed White's send-up of the contemporary music world — Yvonne starts to hold musical salons, inviting the most appalling and deafening avant-garde composers she can find, and of course Paris society can't get enough of it.

Very entertaining. ( )

A tale of twins, one the narrator, the other contributing intermittently by letter. I'm not sure what this book is about - perhaps it shows us Americans flaunting their wealth.