Edward St. Aubyn, The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels *** 1/2

The Patrick Melrose novels live up to their reputation as well written and bitterly humorous depictions of bad behavior (rape, pedophilia, drug addiction, abandonment, murder). They are exceedingly British in tone and content, as befits novels written by someone with a name like Edward St. Aubyn.

The prose is often delicious; as the New Yorker says, "On every page of St. Aubyn’s work is a sentence or a paragraph that prompts a laugh, or a moment of enriched comprehension... The striking gap between, on the one hand, the elegant polish of the narration, the silver rustle of these exquisite sentences, the poised narrowness of the social satire and, on the other hand, the screaming pain of the family violence inflicted on Patrick makes these books some of the strangest of contemporary novels." 

While the bitchy repartee is enjoyable, the Patrick Melrose series falls short of the similarly expansive Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom and Frank Bascombe series (Updike and Ford respectively). As a character, Patrick has a somewhat monomaniacal obsession with questions of parental inheritance, both emotional and economic.  Rabbit and Frank feel more rounded -- and also more American which may account for my closer identification with them.

Never Mind

"I found myself thinking that everybody who is meeting for dinner tonight will probably have said something unkind about everybody else.... Why do people spend the evening with people they've spent the day insulting?"
"So as to have something insulting to say about them tomorrow."

Never Mind takes place over a single day as several characters prepare for a dinner party at the Melrose's French villa. I found most of the book to be too British for my taste, with everyone making wittily cutting remarks as they jockey for social standing. I couldn't care about any of the characters, with the exception of the philosopher Victor and his American girlfriend Anne. Victor is writing a book about the nature and origins of personal identity, and his ideas spark the only meaningful dinner conversation.

One can only refer to Never Mind as a "Patrick Melrose novel" in retrospect, because Patrick is a minor character, albeit one who suffers the only physical violence among all of the psychological violence. To the extent that anyone can be considered the central character, it's David Melrose, Patrick's horrible father.

Bad News

The sensible thing to do was to try to divide the coke into two halves, taking the first now and the second after he had gone out to a nightclub or bar. He would try to stay out until three and take the amphetamines just before returning, so that the lift from the speed would cushion the coke comedown...
Brilliant! He really ought to be in charge of a multinational company or a wartime army to find an outlet for these planning skills.

Patrick was five years old in Never Mind; he is twenty-two in Bad News and has just received word of his father's death in New York City. The story covers his few days in New York collecting his father's ashes.

Patrick starts the trip committed to refraining from heroin (but not other drugs) for the duration, but that commitment doesn't last long. Bad News is an upscale counterpart to Trainspotting, with copious scenes of narcotic debauchery and self-destructive behavior. Patrick's planning skills and his matter-of-fact description of drug-taking logistics give the book a sheen of verisimilitude, but Patrick doesn't display much personality beyond his addictions.

Some Hope

And yet he could never lose his indignation at the way his father had cheated him of any peace of mind, and he knew that however much trouble he put into repairing himself, like a once-broken vase that looks whole on its patterned surface but reveals in its pale interior the thin dark lines of its restoration, he could only produce the illusion of wholeness.

Some Hope is well titled, because in it we find Patrick sober and looking to reconcile himself with his father's legacy.  The main narrative event of the novel is an opulent dinner party in the country, but its emotional center is a more intimate dinner where Patrick tells his former drug partner about his father raping him.

The dinner party is far grander than the one in Never Mind –– Princess Margaret is one of the dozens of guests –– and it is funnier too. 

Mother's Milk

[Patrick] waited in vain for the maturing effects of parenthood. Being surrounded by children only brought him closer to his own childishness.

Mother's Milk is more ambitious than previous books, covering a longer time span and spending significant time in the points of view of other Melrose family members. It is the most acclaimed of the novels (shortlisted for the Booker Prize), but I felt that it exposed the limits of St. Aubyn's writing. All of his characters come across as mere reflections of Patrick.

The problem is most pronounced in Robert, Patrick's five-year-old son with whom we spend the first few chapters. He thinks and talks in a sophisticated manner that is far more like a miniature version of Patrick than any five-year-old ever. We're also introduced to Patrick's wife Mary, whose concerns about parenthood and family are notably similar to her husband's. 

And there was nary a dinner party for St. Aubyn to show off his sparkling dialogue skills!

At Last

"Her experience of Eleanor was so different from mine, it made me realize that I'm not in charge of the meaning of my mother's life, and that I'm deluded to think that I can come to some magisterial conclusion about it... I've been noticing today how inconclusive I feel about both my parents. There isn't any final truth; it's more like being able to get off on different floors of the same building."

At Last returns to the limited time horizon of the initial trilogy. The event in this case is Patrick's mother's funeral. The book starts and ends with mean-spirited rants from Nicholas Pratt, the sole surviving attendee of the Melrose's dinner party in Never Mind. In another nice bit of bookending, there is a philosopher in attendance thinking about the nature and origins of personal identity (including this intriguing tidbit: In a chain of reincarnation, who is being reincarnated?).

Final thoughts

I preferred the original trilogy, probably because they are more targeted (and funnier) than the ambitious final books. For all of his strengths as a prose stylist, St. Aubyn is weak at developing characters, which I found distracting.

Will At Last really be the final Patrick Melrose novel? The series ends with the deaths of Patrick's mother and of David Melrose's last crony, with Patrick feeling like their absence might give him the opportunity (at last) to escape his parents' shadows. 

 

Gerda Saunders, Memory's Last Breath ** 1/2

A bait and switch.

Several years ago (in 2013, according to the preface), I read a few online articles by Gerda Saunders, a 60-year-old academic who had been diagnosed with dementia. The articles presented a view of oncoming dementia from the inside by an articulate woman. I expected Memory's Last Breath to be an expansion of those articles, but it is not, despite its subtitle "Field Notes on My Dementia." Rather, it is Saunders' memoir interspersed with notes from her reading neuroscience literature. She relates incidents when her memory lapses caused a complication, but I didn't find anything new or insightful about the experience of living with dementia.

Saunders has lived a fairly ordinary life, except for the exoticism of growing up in South Africa. For the most part she tells the kinds of stories you'd hear from friends over coffee: the family farm, meeting her husband, emigrating to Salt Lake City,  diets she has tried over the years, how lovely her grandkids are. Her narrative voice occasionally reveals a quirk in her personality, such as this tidbit from when an attacker struck her mother in the head with an axe(!):

Some of us siblings dropped our lives and carpooled or flew across the seven hundred miles to [the town of] George. I was not among them -- and not because I was too busy. With three of my siblings already on their way, I decided to save the trip.

 

Elliot Reed, A Key to Treehouse Living ** 1/2

The cover of A Key to Treehouse Living advertises its "unorthodox" approach to storytelling (in the form of alphabetical glossary entries) and features quotes from respected writers such as Padgett Powell and Joy Williams. I expected a formal experiment along the lines of Dictionary of the Khazars, with a plot and narrator akin to Huckleberry Finn.

The alphabetical organization is a gimmick that doesn't add to the book. The story remains fundamentally linear, and at one point the narrator implies that he wrote it in order. The headings are not strictly alphabetical and often strain to fit the scheme; for example, the section about Salisbury Steak is headed "Loose Meats: Salisbury Steak" to get it into the proper position, and many sections have arbitrary-seeming headings such as "Careful Entry of Neglected Forts."

The narrator is supposed to be a self-educated teenager living largely on his own in the South. However, Reed fails to craft a distinctive voice or point of view for his protagonist. I regularly came across thoughts that didn't seem realistic for the character (such as the discussion of l'appel du vide filed under "Mental Daddy of the Self") and did not come across thoughts that revealed a unique perspective.

Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet *** 1/2

I've been planning to read a biography of Martin Luther for a few years now, at least since John Elliot Gardiner's book about Bach described the Lutheran world. Martin Luther is an extremely consequential person in world history, and I had the sense that he changed society in ways that go far beyond religion. I came across Renegade and Prophet, appropriately enough, at the Book Loft of German Village in Columbus Ohio.

The foremost thing I learned from Renegade and Prophet is that Martin Luther was an unpleasant character. He was quick to anger, vicious and foul-mouthed toward opponents and erstwhile friends, and approached theological questions based on how they affected him. He frequently turned on his closest advisors when they disagreed with him, and he had derogatory nicknames for his enemies. I'm tempted to call him Trumpian but I pray to God that Trump will have nowhere near the impact.

The ideas that spurred the Reformation were quite widespread at the time, with many thinkers arguing against the practices that Luther condemned in his Ninety-Five Theses. Roper does a nice job of describing the society Luther grew up in and the intertwining of religion and politics in the sixteenth century. She also explains the theological niceties that separated Luther from other reformers such as Calvin and Zwingli.

I started to lose interest in second half of the book as Luther retreats into isolation and gets ever more cranky. During this period, other participants take the leading role in the Reformation (most notably Georg Spalatin and Philipp Melanchthon), but this is a biography of Luther not a history of the Reformation.