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queenluaNever Mind by Edward St. Aubyn (Patrick Melrose #1)
This book started out so delightfully and totally and completely my shit that they may as well have stamped "FOR LUA INTERNETPERSON" on the cover. All of these characters are screwed up in ways ranging from "severe" to "absolutely god-awful." The narrative voice is witty and snarky as hell.* It's all even pointing toward culminating in a godawful dinner party. Yes!!! Yes!!!
* (a selection of sample zingers: "At the beginning, there had been talk of using some of her money to start a home for alcoholics. In a sense they had succeeded," "Like many flatterers, he was not aware that he irritated the people he flattered")
A brief indexing of our dramatis personae: there's David Melrose, a former doctor and musician whose primary occupation these days is "drinking a lot" and "being a control freak" and "talking shit", and who's into That Kinky Shit but definitely in an I-love-watching-people-debasing-themselves-and-fuck-consent-what-is-that kinda way. There's Eleanor Melrose, a pitiable housewife who David married for her money and because he clocked that she was too much of a pushover to ever stand against him ("[h]e found her pretty in a bewildered, washed-out way, but it was her restlessness that aroused him, the quiet exasperation of a woman who longs to throw herself into something significant, but cannot find what it is"). Though, she'd be a bit more pitiable if she weren't so indifferent to her son, and so absolutely cowed by her circumstances that she becomes winceworthy to watch. There's Nicholas, the kind of goddamn pompous rich moron who thinks everyone else is a moron, and who blindly simps for David because, idk, weird English class stuff or whatever.
You end up liking most of all Bridget, who's less refined than the rest of them, but far more wise, in that she knows precisely what she wants and how she intends to get it: "In the end she would probably marry [Nicholas] and she would be the fourth Lady Pratt. Then she could divorce him and get half a million pounds, or whatever, and keep [her secret boyfriend] Barry as her sex slave and still call herself Lady Pratt in shops. God, sometimes she was so cynical it was frightening." Cynical, sure. But very honest in her way, compared to all the others! The others relentlessly talk shit about each other behind each other's backs, and throw around the term "bore" with so much contempt you'd think being dull was somehow a worse crime than raping a kid; at least Bridget's canny enough to look at them and wonder to herself, what the fuck is wrong with these people?
But the difference between this book and, say, an episode of Succession, is that there's a five-year-old kid, Patrick, amidst all these horrible godawful people, and rather than just shove the kid in a corner as a bit of stray character background for one of our contemptible protagonists, we're made to feel the full impact of this grotesquery on Patrick—first gradually, than very abruptly and painfully. Everything after that point becomes a great deal less funny; you start wincing rather than delighting in the awfulness of these people.
It remained very much my kinda thing, to be clear, but in a far more somber way.
I liked the length of the thing. A single day, packed so densely with relationships and rivalries and snipes that the head spins, and then it's done.
Bad News by Edward St. Aubyn (Patrick Melrose #2)
This one I liked rather less. It's another quick read, playing out over the course of either twenty-four or forty-eight in-universe hours—my memory of the exact timing is a little fuzzy, as it is to the protagonist himself. You see, young Patrick from the first novel is now twenty-two, hates his father (very understandably), is pretty well fucked up from his childhood, and now is a kinda-functional drug addict. Luckily his family's rich, so he can simply use money to avoid some of the worst possible pitfalls (he's dropping money on fancy dinners and nice hotels without so much as a blink), but it turns out even the life of a rich drug addict is a fucking mess. The book opens with Patrick on a flight from London to New York—his father's died, and he's tasked with crossing the Atlantic to bring back the body. While in New York, Patrick spends that bewildering twenty-four-or-forty-eight-hour period briefly visiting the funeral home with his father's remains and a friend from the first novel... before promptly calling up his old drug dealer, failing to track down his old drug dealer, taking a taxi to the sketchy part of Manhattan in an attempt to score some drugs, being high, coming down from a high, fucking up a few interpersonal relationships, doing yet more drugs, and finally flying home.
The lengthy descriptions of tripping did nothing for me, which, uh, is a pretty significant part of the book! You feel bad for Patrick, and there's a glimpse of the densely-layered cringeworthy interpersonal drama I so loved in the first book, when he ill-advisedly gets dinner with an acquaintance, Marianne, in the middle of his drug binge, and though he imagines maybe this dinner will lead to some delightful cheating on his girlfriend, it instead simply results in the Most Awkward Dinner Ever. So that bit was fun, but mostly this book pulls a close feeling on Patrick's mental state while he's tripping, and that left me feeling about as "meh" as my own fleeting experiences with drugs-harder-than-alcohol.
I will probably continue on with the series, though, because book 1 was that good, and, hey, this one wasn't anything special but at least it read pretty fast. (Apparently book 4 in this series got St. Aubyn onto the Booker shortlist? Seems kinda random for book 4 of 5 in a series to get that honor, but I'm intrigued!)
This book started out so delightfully and totally and completely my shit that they may as well have stamped "FOR LUA INTERNETPERSON" on the cover. All of these characters are screwed up in ways ranging from "severe" to "absolutely god-awful." The narrative voice is witty and snarky as hell.* It's all even pointing toward culminating in a godawful dinner party. Yes!!! Yes!!!
* (a selection of sample zingers: "At the beginning, there had been talk of using some of her money to start a home for alcoholics. In a sense they had succeeded," "Like many flatterers, he was not aware that he irritated the people he flattered")
A brief indexing of our dramatis personae: there's David Melrose, a former doctor and musician whose primary occupation these days is "drinking a lot" and "being a control freak" and "talking shit", and who's into That Kinky Shit but definitely in an I-love-watching-people-debasing-themselves-and-fuck-consent-what-is-that kinda way. There's Eleanor Melrose, a pitiable housewife who David married for her money and because he clocked that she was too much of a pushover to ever stand against him ("[h]e found her pretty in a bewildered, washed-out way, but it was her restlessness that aroused him, the quiet exasperation of a woman who longs to throw herself into something significant, but cannot find what it is"). Though, she'd be a bit more pitiable if she weren't so indifferent to her son, and so absolutely cowed by her circumstances that she becomes winceworthy to watch. There's Nicholas, the kind of goddamn pompous rich moron who thinks everyone else is a moron, and who blindly simps for David because, idk, weird English class stuff or whatever.
You end up liking most of all Bridget, who's less refined than the rest of them, but far more wise, in that she knows precisely what she wants and how she intends to get it: "In the end she would probably marry [Nicholas] and she would be the fourth Lady Pratt. Then she could divorce him and get half a million pounds, or whatever, and keep [her secret boyfriend] Barry as her sex slave and still call herself Lady Pratt in shops. God, sometimes she was so cynical it was frightening." Cynical, sure. But very honest in her way, compared to all the others! The others relentlessly talk shit about each other behind each other's backs, and throw around the term "bore" with so much contempt you'd think being dull was somehow a worse crime than raping a kid; at least Bridget's canny enough to look at them and wonder to herself, what the fuck is wrong with these people?
But the difference between this book and, say, an episode of Succession, is that there's a five-year-old kid, Patrick, amidst all these horrible godawful people, and rather than just shove the kid in a corner as a bit of stray character background for one of our contemptible protagonists, we're made to feel the full impact of this grotesquery on Patrick—first gradually, than very abruptly and painfully. Everything after that point becomes a great deal less funny; you start wincing rather than delighting in the awfulness of these people.
It remained very much my kinda thing, to be clear, but in a far more somber way.
I liked the length of the thing. A single day, packed so densely with relationships and rivalries and snipes that the head spins, and then it's done.
Bad News by Edward St. Aubyn (Patrick Melrose #2)
This one I liked rather less. It's another quick read, playing out over the course of either twenty-four or forty-eight in-universe hours—my memory of the exact timing is a little fuzzy, as it is to the protagonist himself. You see, young Patrick from the first novel is now twenty-two, hates his father (very understandably), is pretty well fucked up from his childhood, and now is a kinda-functional drug addict. Luckily his family's rich, so he can simply use money to avoid some of the worst possible pitfalls (he's dropping money on fancy dinners and nice hotels without so much as a blink), but it turns out even the life of a rich drug addict is a fucking mess. The book opens with Patrick on a flight from London to New York—his father's died, and he's tasked with crossing the Atlantic to bring back the body. While in New York, Patrick spends that bewildering twenty-four-or-forty-eight-hour period briefly visiting the funeral home with his father's remains and a friend from the first novel... before promptly calling up his old drug dealer, failing to track down his old drug dealer, taking a taxi to the sketchy part of Manhattan in an attempt to score some drugs, being high, coming down from a high, fucking up a few interpersonal relationships, doing yet more drugs, and finally flying home.
The lengthy descriptions of tripping did nothing for me, which, uh, is a pretty significant part of the book! You feel bad for Patrick, and there's a glimpse of the densely-layered cringeworthy interpersonal drama I so loved in the first book, when he ill-advisedly gets dinner with an acquaintance, Marianne, in the middle of his drug binge, and though he imagines maybe this dinner will lead to some delightful cheating on his girlfriend, it instead simply results in the Most Awkward Dinner Ever. So that bit was fun, but mostly this book pulls a close feeling on Patrick's mental state while he's tripping, and that left me feeling about as "meh" as my own fleeting experiences with drugs-harder-than-alcohol.
I will probably continue on with the series, though, because book 1 was that good, and, hey, this one wasn't anything special but at least it read pretty fast. (Apparently book 4 in this series got St. Aubyn onto the Booker shortlist? Seems kinda random for book 4 of 5 in a series to get that honor, but I'm intrigued!)
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Date: 2024-05-20 01:48 pm (UTC)But yeah - I knew Never Mind was gonna be your jam, mwahaha. That party has perhaps the most painstakingly constructed rancid vibes of anything I'd ever read, absolute nightmare (approving)
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Date: 2024-05-20 08:22 pm (UTC)YOU WERE INDEED WISE RECCING THIS ONE TO ME, THANK YOU VERY MUCH I HAD A GREAT TIME
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Date: 2024-05-24 07:45 pm (UTC)By coincidence I came across these books just last week (I went down a wikipedia rabbit hole that started with the history of smugglers in Cornwall and historians using the family archives of local titled families, and ended up on Edward St. Aubyn.) You make these books (the first one, anyway) sound way more enticing than Wikipedia did :D
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Date: 2024-05-27 08:05 am (UTC)