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The Patrick Melrose Novels (2012)

by Edward St. Aubyn(Favorite Author)

4.04 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0312429967 (ISBN13: 9780312429966)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Picador

review 1: I picked up Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose Novels because he was mentioned by a couple of writers I like as “someone they were reading at the time.” The collection of four (“Never Mind,” “Bad News,” “Some Hope” and “Mother’s Milk”) are really novellas that comprise a novel. St. Aubyn’s dialogue, including Patrick Melrose’s interior monologues, which constitute much of the work, are truly scintillating. I was reminded most of some of the best Edwardian plays, not just by the snappy dialogue, but also by the focus on the English upper class and its hyper-social consciousness, which you could characterize as inbred if it weren’t for the steady flow of rich American women who buy into status and whose wealth shores up the crumbling finances... more of the aristocracy. Well, I don’t move in those circles, so I take it on faith that St. Aubyn nails the class. I can say for certain that he nails the world of junkies on the Lower East Side of New York in the 70s--a circle that I did not participate in but rather moved through during visits with addict friends who needed to make several trips a day to “alphabet city.” The scenes, the characters and the dialogue are uncannily real. At the end of the reading, while I certainly knew Patrick very well, I felt less like I had experienced a novel and more like I’d just experienced one of those very weird weekends holed up in an apartment with my smack- and coked-out friends. Characterization IS the story, rather than an element of the novel. A good pairing: Success, by Martin Amis. July 2014
review 2: Dear Bret Easton Ellis: Remember that thing you tried to do of mixing rape, drugs, sadism, misogyny, and snobbery to shed light on the poisons of excess and the monstrous behaviors of the haughty, bored upper echelons? Meet Edward St. Aubyn, who does so with panache. This quartet of novels offers the aristocratic English version of _American Psycho_: an immersive, introspective character profile filled with acerbic wit and philosophic heft that takes us through addiction and a whole lot of fucked-up trauma via childhood chateaus, grown-up dinner parties, and The Pierre Hotel. St. Aubyn succeeds where Ellis fails through prose that is elegant and smooth, as though a butler were tending to it. Each page contains a gem--an insight or description that makes the bleak subject matter bearable. There is mordant comedy in unlikely places and keen insight throughout. Two examples: "People spend their whole lives imagining they are about to die. Their only consolation is that one day they're right"; "The claim that every man kills the thing he loves seemed to him a wild guess compared with the near certainty of a man turning into the thing he hates."What happens to Patrick Melrose isn't nearly as compelling as how he grapples with it. These novels are a collective form of sense-making, an attempt at examining trauma without annihilating oneself. The subjects (child abuse, heroin addiction, the bored self-loathing of the wealthy, cruelty, adultery, legacy) have been done before. What separates St. Aubyn is the intelligence and wit he brings to the table.Some criticism: for someone who is supposed to be a master of prose, the phrase "bowel-loosening excitement" appears too often. Vodka is described as "unctuous" more than once. At times, descriptions felt sloppy or lazy, guilty of the can't-be-bothered bourgeois languor St. Aubyn means to skewer.More troublesome was the chill that pervades these pages. Even at the end of _Some Hope_ where Patrick Melrose finally unburdens himself to a friend and has achieved sobriety, the only moment of redemption occurs in a Wordsworth-like communion with nature: Patrick stands by a pond, observing swans and snow, touched by "a strange feeling of elation." That ending felt lyrical and gorgeous, yet solitary and clipped. We see Melrose's progress in his refusal to sleep with his friend's lover. Turning away from vice is as close as we get to virtue. There's a constant shying away in these novels, not from debauchery but from intimacy. The protagonist's weak spot is perhaps the author's as well. It's as though neither can forget himself. Just as he seems to stretch or make progress, he snaps back like a stubborn rubber band, refusing to change shape. Literature is supposed to take us beyond ourselves. I felt a narcissism and emotional stinginess here that, however artful or witty, could never transcend itself--intelligence at the cost of heart. less

Download links for: The Patrick Melrose Novels

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