Edward St. Aubyn is a handsome man. Readers would be lying if they didn’t want to hang out with the guy in the author photo. It’s a bloke who is sharpish, distant, but clearly plagued by unseen troubles- in other words, a gentleman impersonating an anonymous mannequin in Amsterdam.
If you’re a novelist that draws from his or her surroundings, it should become increasingly difficult to write about people in your life when Edward St. Aubyn is already out there writing about his own. You and I will never write like him, so don’t even try. You can dream, but don’t attempt. We all have a childhood trauma or two that in some way screwed us. St. Aubyn is no different, but it’s the telling of his story that is slicker than deer guts. The pain is bottomless, which is both sad and true.
Try to read just one of these books and not immediately feel the urge to tell everyone you know about what you have just experienced. St. Aubyn emerged from his childhood mostly in one piece, but the steam heat that rises off his wobbly profile is permanently warped by what he went through. The emotional warpath Patrick Melrose navigates is both scathing, and seat of your pants indelible. He is a product of rape, and his mother blocks almost everything and everyone out because of it. Patrick’s father raped her too, and from that starting point anything can happen and does. You can now get all five books in one whopper of a doorstop. Picador just released The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels recently and my hyperbolic praise hardly does these books justice.
