Suddenly everyone is talking about Edward St. Aubyn and I had to decide whether the supposed brilliant prose was worth a trip down the Incest and Heroin Addiction Lane. “The books are written with an utterly idiosyncratic combination of
emotional precision, crystalline observation and black humor, as if one
of Evelyn Waugh’s wicked satires about British aristos had been mashed
up with a searing memoir of abuse and addiction, and injected with
Proustian meditations on the workings of memory and time,”Michiko Kakutani raved in The New York Times.
I decided to take a little step and promptly joined the stampede after Michiko....five books later I emerge gasping at the end of a St Aubyn marathon. Whoa! He
is good. Michiko got it right for once. He has a gift for selecting the perfect metaphor. Some examples: A character repeats a phrase just used by someone else he: "
hands the phrase back to Seamus, held by the corner like someone else's used handkerchief", someone else is described as seeing their car as a refuge, it
"was like a consulate in a strange city, and she moved towards it with the urgency of a robbed tourist". The language is so precise and witty and British. He never get's lyrical or fuzzy.
The novels are about a character, Patrick Melrose, at different points in his life. In the first book,
Never Mind he is five, living a very privileged life in the South of France and sexually abused by his father. Fortunately St. Aubyn is not Dorothy Allison or Alice Walker and our noses are not rubbed in it---the fact is awful enough, no colorful descriptions needed and it takes a page and then it is over (at least for the reader).
The second book,
Bad News, is reminiscent of
Lucky Jim, Patrick Melrose staggering around New York on a colossal coke and heroin binge picking up his dead father's ashes. The third book,
Some Hope, finds Patrick sober attending a rather funny house party with Princess Margaret in attendance. The fourth book,
Mother's Milk, is Patrick married with two young children trying to reconnect with his mother in Southern France. The fifth and last book
At Last,at the mother's funeral, is a little disappointing to start but in the end provides a very satisfying conclusion.
Not bad.
