"A shriek of filial hatred": the Patrick Melrose novels of Edward St. Aubyn.
The full page ad in the front of the April issue of Harper's reminded me of another recent addition to my list of booklusts.
The formidable Michiko Kakutani gave the latest novel of Edward St. Aubyn, At Last (published in 2011 in the UK, but published in the U.S. this year) -- which the author at present says is the fifth and concluding installment of his Patrick Melrose novels -- some big love in the 21 February 2012 edition of the New York Times: so big that, not only have other bookchat articles and columns rferenced it, but St. Aubyn's U.S. publishers, Picador, cited her review in their publicity for At Last and the opening trilogy, Some Hope (consisting of the novels Never Mind [1992], Bad News [1993], and Some Hope [1994]; the trilogy was published in omnibus format in the U.S. in 2003 by Open City Books, but it was collected this year with the fourth book, Mother's Milk [2006], as The Patrick Melrose Novels by Picador). The passage in question, which is also the one that convinced me to start seeking out copies of these novels, is as follows:
"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.
....
"...the Melrose books underscore his gift for lassoing the extremes of human experience in coolly chiseled language; for using irony and exactitude to reconfigure the raw, painful facts of life into an art that somehow manages to be affecting, alarming and, yes, amusing, all at the same time."
Aside from St. Aubyn's vaunted style (interestingly enough, James Wood, in the 27 February issue of The New Yorker, feels that the multiple comparisons to Wilde and Waugh are misguided, as he feels that St. Aubyn "is a colder, more savage writer than either") and aristocratic background (Wood again: "the first St. Aubyn baronetcy was created in 1671"), what has captured the attentions and passions of so many bookchatters is the fact that he admitted, seemingly off-handedly, after the publication of Never Mind that he, like his protagonist Patrick Melrose, was sexually abused by his father at the age of five; the abuse continued for three years until he somehow mustered the courage to tell his father to stop, upon which "His father promptly took to his bed and stayed there, threatening to kill himself and blaming his son for it." As Stephen Moss noted in the interview with St. Aubyn that was published in The Guardian in August 2011, "His mother claimed to know nothing of the abuse when he told her decades later;" Sarah Lyall's interview with St. Aubyn in the 14 March New York Times reveals that "some friends of his dead father’s stopped speaking to him. 'Their view was, "What an awful thing to do to his father," ' [St. Aubyn] said."
Unsurprisingly, St. Aubyn was a heroin addict from age 16 to 28; he's admitted that writing the Melrose novels (or "Melrosiad," as James Lasdun dubbed them in his review of At Last in The Guardian) was both a lifeline and a horrible experience. He has no patience with people who dun him for a codex to events in his life as contained in transmogrified form in the novels. Moss wrote in his interview with the author in The Guardian:
"He gets mildly irritated and slumps deeper into his armchair when I try to pinpoint the real events. 'I'm not here to go page by page through a work and say, "This is totally invented, this is partially invented, this is compressed."' St Aubyn is studiedly polite, but every so often you get an intimation of Patrick's prickliness. 'I could take requests, I suppose, for scenes that people think are missing,' he says, when I ask him why he didn't novelise the three years of abuse that followed the rape, and the heroic stand his eight-year-old self took against his tyrannical father. One key omission is the fact that he has an elder sister, who does not appear in the novels. 'It's the highest compliment I can pay her,' he says, stressing her un-Melrosian normality. I ask him how their father treated her. 'That's for her to say.'"
What a marked contrast to the attitude in the U.S.; one is hard-pressed to imagine an American author who would admit to being raped by his own father, and then refuse to elaborate in exhaustive detail, in interviews or in his published work. It scarcely need be said that an American author wouldn't bother to write such an account as fiction, or that his publisher would permit it. Curiously, Moss relates that "an American woman...told him at the first literary festival he attended that Patrick was the embodiment of evil"; one wonders if it was St. Aubyn's refusal to portrayl Melrose in the light of Oprah-sanctioned victimhood that prompted this reaction.
My first trawls at two of the four secondhand bookshops in my exurban area that have a good selection of literary books have proven fruitless; I suspect that I might end up resorting to Amazon to scratch this itch, particularly in light of the bankruptcy and closing of Borders last year. Bah.
The formidable Michiko Kakutani gave the latest novel of Edward St. Aubyn, At Last (published in 2011 in the UK, but published in the U.S. this year) -- which the author at present says is the fifth and concluding installment of his Patrick Melrose novels -- some big love in the 21 February 2012 edition of the New York Times: so big that, not only have other bookchat articles and columns rferenced it, but St. Aubyn's U.S. publishers, Picador, cited her review in their publicity for At Last and the opening trilogy, Some Hope (consisting of the novels Never Mind [1992], Bad News [1993], and Some Hope [1994]; the trilogy was published in omnibus format in the U.S. in 2003 by Open City Books, but it was collected this year with the fourth book, Mother's Milk [2006], as The Patrick Melrose Novels by Picador). The passage in question, which is also the one that convinced me to start seeking out copies of these novels, is as follows:
"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.
....
"...the Melrose books underscore his gift for lassoing the extremes of human experience in coolly chiseled language; for using irony and exactitude to reconfigure the raw, painful facts of life into an art that somehow manages to be affecting, alarming and, yes, amusing, all at the same time."
Aside from St. Aubyn's vaunted style (interestingly enough, James Wood, in the 27 February issue of The New Yorker, feels that the multiple comparisons to Wilde and Waugh are misguided, as he feels that St. Aubyn "is a colder, more savage writer than either") and aristocratic background (Wood again: "the first St. Aubyn baronetcy was created in 1671"), what has captured the attentions and passions of so many bookchatters is the fact that he admitted, seemingly off-handedly, after the publication of Never Mind that he, like his protagonist Patrick Melrose, was sexually abused by his father at the age of five; the abuse continued for three years until he somehow mustered the courage to tell his father to stop, upon which "His father promptly took to his bed and stayed there, threatening to kill himself and blaming his son for it." As Stephen Moss noted in the interview with St. Aubyn that was published in The Guardian in August 2011, "His mother claimed to know nothing of the abuse when he told her decades later;" Sarah Lyall's interview with St. Aubyn in the 14 March New York Times reveals that "some friends of his dead father’s stopped speaking to him. 'Their view was, "What an awful thing to do to his father," ' [St. Aubyn] said."
Unsurprisingly, St. Aubyn was a heroin addict from age 16 to 28; he's admitted that writing the Melrose novels (or "Melrosiad," as James Lasdun dubbed them in his review of At Last in The Guardian) was both a lifeline and a horrible experience. He has no patience with people who dun him for a codex to events in his life as contained in transmogrified form in the novels. Moss wrote in his interview with the author in The Guardian:
"He gets mildly irritated and slumps deeper into his armchair when I try to pinpoint the real events. 'I'm not here to go page by page through a work and say, "This is totally invented, this is partially invented, this is compressed."' St Aubyn is studiedly polite, but every so often you get an intimation of Patrick's prickliness. 'I could take requests, I suppose, for scenes that people think are missing,' he says, when I ask him why he didn't novelise the three years of abuse that followed the rape, and the heroic stand his eight-year-old self took against his tyrannical father. One key omission is the fact that he has an elder sister, who does not appear in the novels. 'It's the highest compliment I can pay her,' he says, stressing her un-Melrosian normality. I ask him how their father treated her. 'That's for her to say.'"
What a marked contrast to the attitude in the U.S.; one is hard-pressed to imagine an American author who would admit to being raped by his own father, and then refuse to elaborate in exhaustive detail, in interviews or in his published work. It scarcely need be said that an American author wouldn't bother to write such an account as fiction, or that his publisher would permit it. Curiously, Moss relates that "an American woman...told him at the first literary festival he attended that Patrick was the embodiment of evil"; one wonders if it was St. Aubyn's refusal to portrayl Melrose in the light of Oprah-sanctioned victimhood that prompted this reaction.
My first trawls at two of the four secondhand bookshops in my exurban area that have a good selection of literary books have proven fruitless; I suspect that I might end up resorting to Amazon to scratch this itch, particularly in light of the bankruptcy and closing of Borders last year. Bah.