Money Talks

The British Novelist Edward St. Aubyn must be one of the most underrated writers in the English language. He isn’t entirely unsung–his sixth novel, Mother’s Milk, made it onto the short list for the Man Booker Prize in 2006–but he’s not sung about anywhere near enough, especially not in the U.S. His books don’t show up on best-seller lists; they tend to be passed hand to hand by cultish devotees and by writers who study him to try to figure out how on earth he does what he does.

St. Aubyn (you say it Saint Awe-bin) is the author of seven novels, five of which–Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother’s Milk and his new one, At Last (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 272 pages)–concern Patrick Melrose, the scion of an intermittently aristocratic and decreasingly wealthy English family. Patrick grows up with far too much money and far too little love. His father is a sadist who rapes him when he’s 5. His mother is too weak and too drunk to intervene, and she eventually squanders much of the family fortune on crackpot New Age mysticism.

Patrick becomes a lawyer, desperately depressed and addicted to alcohol, heroin, infidelity and black humor. Irony, Patrick suggests, is “the hardest addiction of all … that deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.” This kind of material can be tiresome when mishandled–poor little rich boy whose mummy didn’t love him enough! You have to drill down pretty far and pretty mercilessly to get to the vulnerable, human soul of someone like Patrick. But St. Aubyn does, and he mines extraordinary amounts of humor and pathos out of Patrick’s thin, bedraggled life.

At Last takes place entirely on the day of Patrick’s mother’s funeral, with deep, revealing dives into the minds and memories of the people attending it. Now in his 40s, Patrick is trying to figure out how to properly mourn his mother–to become more than the psychic wreckage of his crap childhood and to escape what St. Aubyn calls “the psychological impact of inherited wealth … the demoralizing effect of already having what almost everyone else was sacrificing their precious lives to acquire.”

St. Aubyn gets compared to those other brilliant observers of the wealthy, Fitzgerald and Waugh, but they–as sons of the middle classes–were more vulnerable to the romance of it all. St. Aubyn (whose life parallels that of Patrick Melrose in many respects) writes from inside the building, narcing on the 1% to the rest of us, and they’re not having nearly as much fun as you’d think. Patrick discovers that his wife is cheating on him with an exceptionally dry philosopher when he finds her reading the man’s work. “You couldn’t be reading that book unless you were having an affair with the author,” he remarks. His wife replies, “Believe me, it’s virtually impossible even then.” It’s funny, but jokes are a defense mechanism, and these people are so heavily armored that there’s no possibility of contact between the humans inside.

In its single-day time frame and wandering point of view, At Last bears some resemblance to Mrs. Dalloway, and at its best, St. Aubyn’s prose recalls Virginia Woolf’s; it has that same combination of lyricism and precision. Watch, for example, Patrick’s mother Eleanor dreaming of a drink on a hot morning in Some Hope:

She imagined vodka poured over ice and all the cubes that had been frosted turning clear and collapsing in the glass and the ice cracking, like a spine in the hands of a confident osteopath. All the sticky, awkward cubes of ice floating together, tinkling, their frost thrown off to the side of the glass, and the vodka cold and unctuous in her mouth.

That unctuous–you’ll never look at a vodka, rocks, the same way again.

St. Aubyn has been published quietly in the U.S. for years, but At Last is, at last, being launched with some fanfare, and the first four Patrick Melrose books have been reissued in a single volume (Picador; 688 pages). Don’t miss them this time. It’s not trendy right now to write about the rich, but writing this good goes way beyond trendy. St. Aubyn’s work reminds us that money can be a disaster not just for those who don’t have it but also for those who do.