Some time ago, in a diner on eastern Long Island, I experienced one of those moments to which writers seem especially prone—moments of unseemly over-interest in the people at the next table. Beautifully dressed, sleek and thin as whippets, the young, medicated-seeming mother and her older husband were the sort of parents who transformed each moment with their tiny son into a unique and golden educational opportunity. As the father lectured his squirming child on the proper etiquette required to order a cheeseburger and chat up the waitress, his pedagogical technique had an unmistakable edge of the punitive and mocking.
What made this chilling family scene even more compelling was my vague, unsettling sense that I’d met them all somewhere before. My husband stole a long, sidelong glance at our neighbors. No, he said, we didn’t know them. But they were, he pointed out, the real-life counterparts of the main characters in Edward St. Aubyn’s extraordinary Patrick Melrose novels.
The first of the Melrose novels, Never Mind, begins in the south of France, where the Melrose family lives and where Patrick’s father, David, is first seen methodically drowning a colony of ants and calculating precisely how long he must talk to the maid before her arms start to ache painfully from the load of laundry she’s carrying. As it turns out, David’s barbarous cruelty extends well beyond the insect kingdom and the servants. He rapes his young son, torments his wife, and serves his guests a heady recipe of charm and humiliation.
It’s hard to imagine a bleaker domestic landscape, but what makes these novels so extraordinary and pleasurable to read is how beautifully St. Aubyn writes, his acidic humor, his stiletto-sharp observational skills, and his ability to alchemize these gifts into one quotable, Oscar Wildean bon mot after another. What makes the book so moving, as a writer friend of mine said, is that you feel that its hero is trying at every moment, and with every cell of his being, not to turn into the kind of monster his father is: the sadist that he’s been programmed from birth to become.
That struggle is ongoing throughout Mother’s Milk, in which we catch up with Patrick some years after his marriage to the thoughtful and understandably disaffected Mary. He’s the father of two sons, and his dying mother, Eleanor, has decided to leave his childhood home in Provence to a sleazy guru named Seamus and his sketchy New Age foundation. The book abounds in visions of motherhood gone wrong, either through monumental self-interest (the awfulness of Mary’s mother, Kettle, makes Eleanor seem almost beneficent) or through the sort of quasi-erotic attachment that connects Patrick’s wife and their two little boys, and that makes Patrick feel progressively more alienated from that cozy trio.
Few contemporary authors write more knowingly from the point of view of the child who is smarter and more observant than the adults around him imagine. Mother’s Milk starts, nervily, with what I suppose is called a “birth memory”—in this case, that of Robert, Patrick’s older son, recalling his first experience of wrenching separation from his mother. The novel follows the family as the parents’ marriage unravels, as Patrick initiates a love affair with a witty and unhappy former girlfriend, and as he flirts with the sort of substance abuse that turned Bad News (the second Melrose novel) into a dispatch from the private hell of a damned soul who simply couldn’t get high enough to lower the frequency of his own acute, self-lacerating awareness.
Near the end of Mother’s Milk, the Melrose family decides to cope with their exile from Patrick’s childhood paradise by taking a salutary, restorative trip to the United States. By now, the reader can pretty much predict how well this solution will work out, just as we can expect the vacation to provide St. Aubyn with yet another chance to display his gift for making us recognize a volley of hilariously barbed and enraged perceptions as the flailings of a character struggling not to drown in a sea of despair.
Here, to take one example, are the anxious young Robert’s musings on the “hysterical softness” of his fellow passengers boarding the flight from Heathrow to New York, strangers displaying
a special kind of tender American obesity; not the hard-won fat of a gourmet, or the juggernaut body of a truck driver, but the apprehensive fat of people who had decided to become their own airbag systems in a dangerous world. What if their bus was hijacked by a psychopath who hadn’t brought any peanuts? Better have some now. If there was going to be a terrorist incident, why go hungry on top of everything else?
Eventually, the Airbags dented themselves into their seats. Robert had never seen such vague faces, mere sketches on the immensity of their bodies. Even the father’s relatively protuberant features looked like the remnants of a melted candle.
However much we may love our parents, filial affection only rarely trumps our fear that we may grow up to become them. This unease is closer to terror for Patrick Melrose, whose anxiety is understandable, given that his father, David, is a pedophile and a rapist, while his mother, Eleanor, is a dotty do-gooder whose telescopic philanthropy makes Dickens’s Mrs. Jellyby seem a paragon of maternal solicitude, and who, in a fit of misguided charity, gives away Saint-Nazaire, the beloved house in the south of France, the only place where Patrick ever felt at home.
The Patrick Melrose novels can be read as the navigational charts of a mariner desperate not to end up in the wretched harbor from which he first embarked on a route that has steered him in and out of heroin addiction, alcoholism, marital infidelity, and a range of behaviors for which the term “self-destructive” is a euphemism.
Summarizing these novels can make them sound like yet another account of wretched family dysfunction, brightened by copious infusions of lively table talk and British-American expat high-society glamour. Indeed, that society is so high that Some Hope features a country-house party at which the guest of honor is Princess Margaret, portrayed here as a figure of jaw-dropping idiocy, petty snobbishness, and blinkered self-involvement.
But in order to understand what makes these novels so extraordinary, one should open them at random to marvel at the precise observations, the glistening turns of phrase, the dialogue witty enough to make one’s own most clever conversations sound like . . . well, like St. Aubyn’s Princess Margaret at her most platitudinous. Patrick’s sons, Robert and Thomas—whose protected childhoods could hardly be less like the tormented boyhood Patrick endures in Never Mind—are as astutely observant as their father. Mother’s Milk suggests that children not only are smarter than we might imagine, but they are, almost from birth, wise to their parents’ foibles. Ultimately, Thomas’s sage observation that the mind exists to be changed will help rescue the newly orphaned Patrick from the dismal straits in which we find him at the beginning of At Last:
It was all very well for the Oliver Twists of this world, who started out in the enviable state it had taken him forty-five years to achieve, but the relative luxury of being brought up by Bumble and Fagin, rather than David and Eleanor Melrose, was bound to have a weakening effect on the personality. Patient endurance of potentially lethal influences had made Patrick the man he was today, living alone in a bedsit, only a year away from his visit to the Suicide Observation Room in the Depression Wing of the Priory Hospital. It had felt so ancestral to have delirium tremens, to bow down, after his disobedient youth as a junkie, to the shattering banality of alcohol.
These books are at once extremely dark and extremely funny. In Bad News, Patrick visits New York, where his father has just died. “It was hot, and he really ought to take off his overcoat, but his overcoat was his defence against the thin shards of glass that passers-by slipped casually under his skin, not to mention the slow-motion explosion of shop windows, the bone-rattling thunder of subway trains, and the heartbreaking passage of each second, like a grain of sand trickling through the hourglass of his body. No, he would not take off his overcoat. Do you ask a lobster to disrobe?” A minor character in At Last is described as having three drawbacks as a guest: “She was incapable of saying please, incapable of saying thank you and incapable of saying sorry, all the while creating a surge in the demand for these expressions.” Meanwhile, the humor is deepened by our sense that Patrick’s banter and the dazzling pyrotechnics of his interior monologues are a source of pain for him, as he hears, in his own witticisms, chilling echoes of the “pure contempt” of his father’s mocking humor.
In At Last, Patrick comes to see that these aspects of his personality have insulated and distanced him from the life around him. “He was doing what he always did, under pressure, observing everything, chattering to himself in different voices, circling the unacceptable feelings.” Irony, he tells a friend, “is the hardest addiction of all. Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, that deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.”
It’s possible to read At Last without knowing the earlier novels, but it is a bit like paging straight to Time Regained and skipping the rest of Proust, especially if Marcel had discovered the equivalent of what Patrick learns: the linden tea was laced with hemlock and the madeleines were poisoned. Without having met David Melrose’s old friend Nicholas Pratt—whose manic rants evoke the specter of Noël Coward on crack—in his prime, it’s hard to understand why his surprise appearance at Eleanor’s funeral should affect Patrick (and us) rather like Carrie’s arm shooting out of the grave at the end of the Brian De Palma film. Most of the characters have long and tortuous shared histories, and secrets to which we are privy, so that the most minor event—a little boy watching a gecko—reminds us of a similar, significant incident in the past.
Without having witnessed Patrick’s suffering, we are inadequately equipped to fully appreciate the magnitude of the realizations he arrives at in the final and most meditative of the Melrose novels.
It’s a credit to St. Aubyn’s delicacy that the passages inspired by Eleanor’s death strike us as belonging less to the realm of psychology than to that of metaphysics.
What would it be like to live without consolation, or the desire for consolation? He would never find out, unless he uprooted the consolatory system that had started on the hillside at Saint-Nazaire and then spread to every medicine cabinet, bed and bottle he had come across since; substitutes substituting for substitutes . . . What if memories were just memories, without any consolatory or persecutory power? Would they exist at all, or was it always emotional pressure that summoned images from what was potentially all of experience so far? Even if that was the case, there must be better librarians than panic, resentment and dismembering nostalgia to search among the dim and crowded stacks.
I wonder if the novel’s end might seem more purely optimistic had we not observed Patrick’s earlier victories over his past and subsequent relapses. If this is, as St. Aubyn’s publisher claims, the “culmination” of the Melrose cycle, we can only wish Patrick well and be thankful that his travails have furnished the material for some of the most perceptive, elegantly written, hilarious, and important novels of our era.