The only thing saving this book from getting one star is that St. Aubyn occasionally has moments of brilliance in his writing, and sentences come out that are funny and poignant and wonderfully descriptive. But those moments are amidst so much awfulness that I only made it through the first two books in this four-book collection, and there's no way I'm reading the third and fourth. Every character in these books are terrible, unlikable people who do horrible, despicable things, and I could only take so much of that.I honestly don't understand what people like about this series. After spending three days binge reading, I'm left nearly speechless. The four books span 40 years of a life that is at once tragic and hilarious and are written in brilliant prose that is by turns scathing, loving, questioning, satirical and always brutally honest.That St. Aubyn was able to survive his horrifying childhood and youth and turn it into art is the sign of a ferocious will to survive and a great talent.The voices are stunningly real - five year old Patrick in France observing his awful parents, shutting out the terrible things that are done to him, 22 year old Patrick in New York in a death spiral with heroin and cocaine, gone to collect his dead father's ashes, recognizing the need to get clean but not yet. Thirty two year old Patrick clean now, at a memorably awful London party filled with rich and titled people being horrid to each other but so amusingly, and finally forty two year old Patrick, married with two children, earnestly determined not to repeat his parents' mistakes with them, feeling cast adrift by his wife's total absorption with their second son.David, his father, was a sadist, a rapist and a pedophile. Eleanor, his mother was compliant, a willing victim who became obsessed with doing good, as long as it was done at long distance and not to her family, and involved some sort of New Age idiocy. Her answer to the trauma of being disinherited as a young woman is to do the identical thing to Patrick and his children, leaving Patrick's childhood home to Seamus, a smug Irish guru whose drum ceremonies and past life regression blather allow him to feel righteous about stripping her of all of her property and then abandoning her to her failing health and dementia so that she becomes Patrick's to care for. His struggles to come to terms with the reality of both parents, to achieve detachment if not forgiveness, are moving.There are sentences on every page that deserve reading aloud, and rereading. The description of the infant Robert's birth from HIS point of view is terrifying, funny and sweet all at once. Patrick's drug memories are truly frightening. I'll never be able to think about Princess Margaret again without imaging how horrid she was at that party. There are so many memorable scenes and characters that it is impossible to name them all. Just read the book.
Do You like book I Melrose (2012)?
Just read a review in the Atlantic that praises his "cut-glass prose and skewering eye"
—joxthejoker
