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.
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