Although Edward St. Aubyn has received handsome praise from a number of more than respectable novelists and critics, my sense is that he is still something of a secret, less known than he should be to readers who try to keep up with contemporary fiction.
What brought him to significant attention was the issuing, in 2012, of the Patrick Melrose Novels, a collection of four books in a sequence that concluded in 2011 with a fifth book, At Last. Although there is much that is satiric and comic in the sequence, neither word is the right label for these novels, the protagonist of which is an aristocratic, highly literate Englishman whose life is traced from his devastating childhood to his troubled adulthood. Since a subtle combination of the harrowing and the hilarious makes the Melrose books one of the finest achievements in recent decades, some consideration of them is in order before turning to St. Aubyn’s new novel, a free-wheeling fantasy about the machinations of a Booker-type prize committee.
Never Mind, which launched the Melrose series in 1992, features the sexual abuse of Patrick as a child by his monstrous father, David, whose other misdeeds include the rape of his wife, Eleanor, which eventuated in Patrick’s birth. In the second novel, Bad News (all have snappy two-word titles), Patrick, now deep into alcohol and hard drugs, travels to New York to secure his deceased father’s ashes while engaging in a terrifying two-day stretch of over-the-top injections and consumption. In Some Hope, which follows, a stay at a treatment center and ensuing sobriety, though of a tenuous sort, sees him functioning as one of many characters in a large house party in Gloucestershire, attended by a feisty and unpleasant Princess Margaret. Mother’s Milk, next in the sequence (and St. Aubyn’s best novel), shows Patrick as father to two boys: the impossibly articulate Robert, age 5, and Thomas, only recently born. The final novel, At Last, is set at Patrick’s mother’s funeral and offers a roving look at the cast of characters, most of them met previously. At the end of the book, Patrick, separated from his wife and children, determines to make an effort toward possible atonement.
Reviewing the Melrose books, James Wood called them “some of the strangest of contemporary novels. . . . On every page of St. Aubyn’s work is a sentence or a paragraph that prompts a laugh, or a moment of enriched comprehension.” Wood found St. Aubyn to be a colder, more savage writer than either Evelyn Waugh or Oscar Wilde, distinguished predecessors in the line of acerb wit. One of St. Aubyn’s sentences gets at the central concern of all these novels: Patrick, apropos the difficulty in giving up things one is addicted to, tells his ex-lover Julia, “Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, that deep-down need to mean two things at once, or be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.”
Other sentences, taken more or less at random from Mother’s Milk, show that Patrick’s (and St. Aubyn’s) irony always contains a little kick of surprise. Thinking about taking his infant Thomas to visit, for the first time, his virtually speechless grandmother, who is confined to a nursing home, Patrick muses: “She wouldn’t be able to say much, but then neither would Thomas. . . . They might get on really well.” Of his dependence on an anti-anxiety medication, Patrick admits that “he definitely had a Tamazepan problem, namely, that it wasn’t strong enough.” Of his wife’s mother, Kettle, we are informed: “Kettle was a supreme source of useless advice, fed by the deep wells of her own uselessness as a mother.” When Patrick imagines a superhero, he is to be called Whateverman: “Not an action hero like Superman or Spiderman, but an inaction hero, a hero of resignation.”
There is a wonderful episode when the family goes to New York City, and on the plane, an obese family tries to wedge themselves into seats bordering the Melroses; Robert dubs them The Airbags, their vague faces “merely sketches on the immensity of their bodies.” Food is especially toxic in the novels: Dessert at the house of some unpleasant acquaintances consists of “a slimy mound of custard in a puddle of caramel.” The horrible Venus Pizza, a foodery in New York where the Melroses mistakenly find themselves, has a handwritten sign in the window stating “GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS,” which gave no hint of the “disgusting food that was being prepared indoors.” An unbelievable combination of pineapple, Swiss cheese, and smoked chicken, all served with French fries and onion rings, elicits from Robert the following: “Everything is ‘mouthwatering’ . . . what does that mean? That you need a huge glass of water to wash away the taste?” To which his father replies, “It’s more like a police report on what they found in someone’s dustbin than a dish.”
This new novel is a slighter effort than the Melrose ones, but it is no less effective in its skewering of the so-called Elysian Book Prize committee, with its five feckless members and their dubious procedures to decide on the year’s outstanding novel. There’s no focus on a central figure: Things move quickly from one to another committee member, as well as to assorted related characters. The committee’s chairman, Malcolm Craig, is a onetime undersecretary of state for Scotland who lost his job as the result of an ill-advised speech and is hoping to recoup his losses. He gets his secretary to skim through the prize submissions for ones with a “Scottish flavour,” and she comes up with three titles, the most impressive being wot u starin at, a “harsh but ultimately uplifting account of life on a Glasgow housing estate.” Malcolm wants the committee to choose a novel that “really hits the spot when it came to new voices, the real concerns of ordinary people, and the dark underbelly of the Welfare State.”
St. Aubyn’s skill as a master mimic of language, both dead and pretentious, is strongly on display, and is found equally in the excerpts he provides from the various submissions and in the thoughts and aspirations of the panel’s members. The panel also includes Jo Cross, whose byword is Relevance; Penny Feathers, herself a second-rate novelist whose hair in middle age has remained “resolutely mahogany, matching her eyes, but increasingly at odds with the sad story told by the sags and creases of her loosening skin”; and Tobias Benedict, who misses all the meetings because he’s touring the country playing Estragon in a hip-hop version of Waiting for Godot. The only sympathetic member (and one of the few such characters in the book as a whole) is Vanessa Shaw, a sharp-talking Cambridge don who believes only in “good writing” and is openly scornful of the other members’ different agendas. When chairman Malcolm, laying down the ground rules for awarding the £80,000, declares that the social responsibility of the committee demands they award the prize to someone who really needs the money, Vanessa retorts, “It’s lucky Proust and Nabokov aren’t competing this year . . . or Henry James or Tolstoy.” She is broken in upon by Jo, who charges her with showing off how much she’s been reading.
The plethora of characters makes St. Aubyn’s shifts from one to another often seem less than inevitable; but he gives ample attention to Sonny Bandanpur, a rich Indian whose 2,000-page novel, The Mulberry Tree, does not make the Long List (preparatory to the final Short List). Sonny determines to bring his devoted man of all seasons, Mansur, to the awards dinner for the purpose of assassinating Malcolm. But Sonny’s Aunt Lakshmi (“Auntie,” as she is known) has received a place on the Short List for her book The Palace Cookbook, a compilation of Indian recipes handed down through the ages and mistaken by the judges for a novel. When interpreted through the lens of Foucault, it becomes a serious contender for the prize, thus somewhat abating Sonny’s killer rage.
St. Aubyn is marvelous at imagining brilliant computer programs to aid the hardworking novelist, such as a “highly addictive software” called Ghost, which can be upgraded to Gold Ghost and Gold Ghost Plus. The hack novelist Penny Feathers finds it extremely useful:
There is also Alternate Narrative, an “empowering and proactive” software that allows the reader to choose alternative outcomes. St. Aubyn’s eye and ear for the fatuous is everywhere on display: Penny, an especially good target of humor, opines that “the wonderful thing about historical novels is that one gets to meet so many famous people.” And the physically repellent get their due, as a slimy literary agent named John Elton sports “a disastrous hair transplant”: “The raw red patches of stitched skin formed little islands of dying hair in a shining ocean of baldness.” Quite beautiful, really.
Although there are a few “positive” characters in this stew of nauseous bookchat and moral sleaziness, we come away from Lost for Words thinking less about the turpitudes of London literary pseuds than about the author’s extraordinary ability to make us delight in fraudulent writers and writing—in what the committee’s chairman thinks are “fresh, original, and exciting new voices.” Henry James wrote of Anthony Trollope’s “complete appreciation of the usual.” Edward St. Aubyn’s complete appreciation is directed rather at the distasteful and the bathetic, made vividly present through sentences that are always alive and crackling.
William H. Pritchard is Henry Clay Folger professor of English at Amherst College.
