About the Novel

The Irrelevant Saint is the only novel Rose Finkenstaedt published during her lifetime — brought out by William Morrow in 1966 under the pen name Reuben H. Lewis. She chose the pseudonym deliberately: her husband James Finkenstaedt was a publisher at William Morrow, and she did not want the book's reception to be colored by any suggestion of special treatment. It was published on its own merits, and it stands on them.

Its protagonist, Alexander Sanctis, shares with Caspar Butler-Brown in The Misfit the novel's most fundamental preoccupation: racial identity as something unstable, ambiguous, and ultimately constructed rather than fixed. Where Caspar is mixed-race by birth — neither fully Black nor white in a world that insists on classification — Sanctis undergoes a slower, more interior transformation. Born in Harlem to what he has always understood to be an Italian family, he gradually comes to understand that his origins are not what he was told. His mother — dark-complexioned, of entirely unclear origins, having taught herself Italian to pass as Italian in a Harlem neighborhood where Italians ranked above Jews and Negroes — has never told the truth about where she came from. His sister Anna has married a Black man. Harvey, Anna's husband, tells Sanctis furiously that his mother is "as black as I am." Weezie's father, meeting Sanctis for the first time, looks at him narrowly and asks his daughter: "He isn't colored, is he? He looks like he might have Negro blood."

By the time Sanctis opens the Church of Presidents in Washington to its Black congregation and throws himself into the civil rights movement, he has come to believe — or to have decided to believe — that he is Black. This is the novel's central and most disturbing argument: that the line between becoming and discovering, between choosing and knowing, cannot be drawn cleanly. Sanctis plans, as the flap copy puts it, "to give western civilization its coup de grâce by using its own values — love, money, religion — against it." He would lead the Black community against the white power structure and create a new order. He is, simultaneously, saint, charlatan, and victim — and the novel refuses to separate these three.

The structure is organized around the theological stages of his self-appointed mission — chapters titled Lapsation, Admission, Contrition, Concupiscence, Trespass, Pride — and its central irony is both precise and devastating. Sanctis cannot subordinate his enormous ego to the movement he has chosen to serve. His commitment is real, but it is inseparable from his need to be its hero. He writes journals "for posterity." He imagines himself the necessary link between the dying phase of Western Christian culture and some new human context. The Black community of Harlem ultimately ships him back to South America on a freighter — not out of cruelty but out of necessity. He is simply not useful to a movement that cannot afford the weight of his self-mythology. His legacy to his people, as the flap copy notes with perfect economy, is "a journal no one wanted to read."

The ending is the finest in any of the three novels: Sanctis, sick and delirious on the freighter, slips into the harbor at Georgetown and sinks. It is both absurdist and genuinely moving — a death that is also, in some sense, a fulfillment.

"This is the story of a man who becomes Negro, but who can never shake his cultural assimilation as a white." — William Morrow flap copy, 1966

Key Passages

"He was born into an Italian family in Harlem. His mother dreamed of the day when he would be a successful gangster like Joey Martinelli — there didn't seem much else for him in the way of opportunity."

"Goddam your lousy mother. She's as black as I am; how does she get off calling me black?"

"He looks like he might have Negro blood." "No," she reacted, shocked. "He's an Italian." Then, surprised at her reaction to an intimation of this kind, she turned away. Not Alex. Alex couldn't be a black."

"Even if he didn't have the reputation of more famous Western heroes, he had tried to be one, and he ended up in their tradition."

In the Context of the Oeuvre

The Irrelevant Saint shares with The Misfit the conviction that racial identity is not a biological fact but a social and cultural construction — something imposed, performed, discovered, or chosen. Together the two novels dramatize in fiction the argument that Face-to-Face would make in scholarship nearly thirty years later: that the racial categories white culture enforces are fabrications, and that those who fall across their boundaries expose the arbitrariness on which the entire system depends. Sanctis's tragedy is not that he fails to be Black — it is that the culture he is trying to dismantle has formed him so completely that he cannot step outside it, even when he believes he has crossed to the other side of it. In this sense The Irrelevant Saint also anticipates Intellectual Elitism: the white intellectual who opposes his civilization cannot escape the tools it gave him, and those tools ultimately undo him.