Even More Walser
Excellent essay by Neel Mukherjee in Boston Review on the British novelist Edward St. Aubyn. here’s the gist of his argument:
Edward St. Aubyn, born in 1960, is the most fascinating of contemporary literary investigators into the phenomenon and experience of class. His first published novels were Never Mind and Bad News in 1992, followed in 1994 by Some Hope, the third installment in what would come to be known prematurely as “The Patrick Melrose Trilogy,” after its central character. Prematurely, because the trilogy became a quartet with the publication of Mother’s Milk in 2006. In between the Patrick Melrose books, St. Aubyn wrote two other novels: On the Edge (1998), a scintillating, witty satire on New Age mumbo-jumbo that also manages to be a serious (and seriously intelligent) dissertation on consciousness and the nature of the mind; and the curious experiment A Clue to the Exit (2000). These two novels arise from a central concern sounded repeatedly in the quartet, that of consciousness and embodiment, and give St. Aubyn’s oeuvre a remarkable unity, approaching almost a programmatical poetics.
I haven’t read Aubyn, although after this essay he seems highly worthwhile.
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He’s right: the Patrick Melrose novels are absolutely brilliant–full of lines that make you laugh out loud at their vicious perfection, followed by scenes so painful that it’s hard not to give up and put the book away. I have a hard time recommending them because the misanthropy is so thick it turns a lot of people off, but I find that Patrick’s indomitable desire to make his life work balances that.