thread for discussion of edward st aubyn;s patrick melrose novels, never mind bad news some hope mother's milk at last

i have the impression that there's a shift in style or register or commitment to structure in the latter two, but i am still halfway through book three and avoiding further details for the moment

They're really funny, despite being about some of the most horrible things

I've not read the st aubyn bks (tho yes have picked them up cheap in fopp) but the general description - poshos + cruel comedy - puts me in mind of simon raven as much as powell or waugh

ty thomp

but in some ways they're more like gaspar noé or nicholas winding refn

I read a shortish chunk of the first one & it didn't really take but this is the first thing I've heard that makes me think I should go back and persist, even though I do not really like noé or refn. I've sort of assumed (as I've said elsewhere) they're some combo of posh voyeurism + misery memoir/TLS + subjunctives-and-poise prose style.

i still want to read them. everything i read about them came from interviews/essays where other writers raved about them. so, i guess i'm always interested in writer's writers kinda books.

the third one doesn't do the these-are-vile-events-and-how-do-you-feel-about-enjoying-the-way-they-are-presented stuff of the first two and actually has a non-ironic emotional resolution, how peculiar

is the third one 'the one about the queen mother coming to visit' or is it 'the one about one last weekend in the south of france'? because i liked the former and thought the latter was probably the worst of them

haha it's the former but fyi 'princess margaret' and 'the queen mother' are not the same entity

really?

lamp is fronting, as a canadian he is intimately familiar w/ his rulers

puts me in mind of simon raven as much as powell or waugh

He has a nicer style than Raven--less undermining of perfect sentences in order to make a cheap sex jokes.

dylan moran is a big fan of his

The only books I've read on a Kindle (out of necessity).

necessity?

The gf bought them on her Kindle and she wanted me to read them so...

✓

very long profile in next weeks newyorker does a comfortable job making everything about his melrose novels worthless

his new novel looks like it kind of might have succeeded in doing that by itself

I thought I had tried to explain my theory that actually these were about ==the problem of other minds== on this thread but apparently i never did

Loved the Melrose books, but the new one looks very dodgy. Have it on order from the library as I'm not sure it warrants the spending of $

I thought I had tried to explain my theory that actually these were about ==the problem of other minds== on this thread but apparently i never did

There was a thing in the Atlantic (I think?) about him that kinda echoed that thomp. Also made me want to read them.

itt ppl talk abour profiles of edward st aubyn i have not read

this one btw?

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/05/the-disillusionist/359809/

"But does St. Aubyn have another story worth telling? While working on the Melrose series, he also wrote two other novels, which were not as successful. One of them, On the Edge (1998), presumably a by-product of his thinking about that fraudulent shaman, is a good-natured comedy about New Ageism in general. The other, A Clue to the Exit (2000), is a novel about how hard it is to write a novel, and is obsessed with one of St. Aubyn’s favorite themes, the problem of consciousness: What is the self, and how can we think about it without our thoughts getting in the way? There are moments in the book when St. Aubyn, an immensely gifted writer of realistic fiction, seems to be suffering from the postmodernist’s ailment: a crippling awareness of the made-upness of novels."

Yes, that one. Although maybe it didn't echo your theory at all.

nah, my theory was way cleverer

I had not realised the extent to which the new one was a roman a clef viz his own experience of not winning the booker. oh dear

Um, there's a 5-part miniseries starring Benedict Cumberbitch, on Showtime (in the US) and Sky Atlantic (in the UK). I won't see it for a while (no cable), but it has a score by Hauschka.

It's okay. The books are better, obviously. I enjoyed the Booker book and the NYer profile, though.

Okay = no real reason to exist especially as the books are so short, but not terrible. I haven't seen the Princess Anne scene yet, which is the only part I'm really curious about.

i still have two books to read. I don't have any desire to see an adaptation since the books are searingly vivid to me.

like he sketches the characters so elliptically but they are so fully formed that seeing an actor playing one of them could never be anything other than a disappointment.

a (possibly stupid) thought of mine was that Bad News would have been better titled Bad Blood.

(given the obsession with bodily fluids in that book).

Loved the books, but have absolutely no desire to watch child rape on TV.

I've only read A Clue to the Exit, which I thought was clunky and bad, and I only finished it because it was very short and I was on holiday in Turkey with a limited number of books. So I haven't bothered with him since but I've now seen so much praise for the Melrose books that maybe I was wrong, or maybe A Clue To The Exit was just a one-off misfire

The last two Melrose novels are far inferior to the original trilogy, imho.

The general consensus seems to be that all his non-Melrose books are pretty bad: one of those writers who fall apart if they move beyond autobiography.

The last two Melrose novels are far inferior to the original trilogy, imho.

― Ward Fowler, Monday, June 4, 2018 11:09 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

bullshit, mother's milk is the best one

i was skeptical of the miniseries bc... how necessary are these books without aubyn's sense of patrick's or mary's or robert's interiority? but it's really well done; weirdly my least favorite books of the series work the best, some hope in particular. at last made me cry a lot

only seen the first one, cumberbatch is good!

Yeah, series was great. Now need to read the books.

I finished At Last, at last. It's very good but does a lot of exposition that would have just been evident from the situations, dialogues or fleeting disconnected or overlapping thoughts in the initial trilogy. Still it is very good and it was helpful for me. A friend said it had done her more good than the therapy she'd been going through.

Mother's Milk is the weakest by some distance and Ward F is correct that both of the final books are a significant drop in quality.

The most amazing thing about finishing the cycle is feeling like there are characters in there (particularly Patrick, of course) that seem as vivid to me as my actual friends. I was in London as I was reading it and fully expected to bump into Partick/ Edward St A.