A praiseful blurb from Zadie Smith on the inside cover of Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose Novels serves as a convenient trigger warning for the curious peruser. In these pages, one will encounter “parental death, heroin, childhood rape, emotional frigidity, suicide, alcoholism”—don’t forget the sadistic circumcision ritual!—and, she insists, they’re very funny. And St. Aubyn is funny. His dry and occasionally outrageous humor is an off-kilter, yet somehow inevitable complement to the unflinching attention he pays to what’s wretched and truly ugly. Both characteristics attest to a rare sensitivity that so captivated this reader that, when faced with the uncommon dilemma of questioning whether I could stomach reading on, I found myself positively addicted to St. Aubyn’s prose.
The Patrick Melrose Novels—Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother’s Milk, and At Last—orbit the titular protagonist, a member of the English upper class, from young childhood to midlife. Very early on in the series, he’s subjected to terrible abuse at the hands of his father. St. Aubyn stunningly traces the impact of violence in its immediacy and upon the terrain of physical and psychic landscapes, so that cruelty bleeds beyond the boundaries of narrative events in a sort of menacing aura. Have you ever felt as if you were reading on eggshells? We find Patrick again when he’s turned to heroin as a young man. He forgives, or something like that. He has children of his own. He drinks, separates from his wife. Both of his parents die. Then what?
Melrose is whipsmart, ironic. (“Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, 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.”) He’s suspicious of the universe—a word that he would almost certainly place in scare quotes. He’s also deeply committed to imagining what might lie beyond rumination, recapitulation, and all manner of despair. St. Aubyn’s writing is electric. His metaphors are audacious and hyperactive, occasionally difficult to track—I bow even to those that bested me. There’s this urgency—a sense that he’s always trying to cut through to something vital, trying to capture some stinging sensation. Part of what so beguiled me was the relentless rhythm of the text. There’s no dichotomy between action and rest, or discord and peace. Instead, the narration thrums with the subtle energy of a hunt: quiet periods, lying in wait, then a glimpse of the pursued object, hurtling toward long-awaited confrontation or disappointment. So that’s what it’s like to be alive and haunted. St. Aubyn knows the strange pressure of the past butting into the present. I’m referring to the Past that includes those events one has confronted personally along with one’s lineage, inheritance, coincidental ensnarements. Given the weight of that pressure, there’s something profound about Patrick’s—and St. Aubyn’s—insistence that one might, perhaps, break through it all and live unencumbered.
Our cultural fascination with trauma and its intergenerational effects has mounted since the first books in this series were published in the 1990s. There seems to lie an assumption that, today, we are talking about trauma with unprecedented honesty—laying bare what was once obscure and acknowledging the invisible mechanisms that keep us beholden to the past. All this discourse serves to establish a familiar lexicon for talking about subjects like survival and abuse. Personal experience is filtered through ever-universalized conventions and meaning is obscured when anyone might dissociate running into an ex at a party. Reading these novels, I found myself butting up against the litany of assumptions I’ve internalized regarding trauma and narrative. Actually, St. Aubyn’s perspective struck me as distinctly unfamiliar. The odd strains of “relatability” surfacing through his idiosyncratic narrative voice shone unexpected and strange.
I was caught in my first assumption a few chapters into Never Mind, which finds Patrick at five. (I must add that St. Aubyn’s instincts for writing children—so bizarre, audacious, flush with secret insights into other realms—is unparalleled.) I had to account for the fact that I’d deluded myself into believing that Patrick’s father, David Melrose, was the protagonist. I knew these were The Patrick Melrose Novels, but I assumed that this must be David’s story because he was so damn nasty. Later in the novel, David takes sick pleasure in considering his young son as a “blank consciousness” to mold in whichever shape he so chooses. Naturally, the project of this novel must be to delve into David’s own childhood and find some totalizing explanation for his menace. Because doesn’t the fact of that menace promise a prehistory worthy of excavation and examination? In the absence of this reckoning, we’re left with a character who is just that: so damn nasty.
“Villain origin story” is a popular term born out of comic book movie franchises and their business of raising corpses. Per Movie Web, films of this ilk include Hannibal Rising (2007), Maleficent (2014), and Joker (2019). As far as I can tell, without having spent a considerable amount of time watching or thinking about any of these films, they follow precisely the kind of logic that lurked behind my assumption about David. Evil is like a Russian nesting doll: look behind one bad guy and you’ll find the villain that corrupted him, and so on, ad infinitum. Consumer taste for the villain origin story squares with the influence of pop psychology. Watching these movies, we peer behind the villain and his wreckage in order to find the vulnerable child who could have become anyone, prior to the fall. There is comfort in this prehistory and great anxiety contained in the suspicion that no backstory is coming to save us. Horror movies with child villains might be especially chilling because they suggest a kind of evil that emerges of its own accord. Devil without a cause.
As he ages and reflects, Patrick recognizes the impact of David’s own childhood on the horrors he inflicted. Any probable explanation for David’s violence is not an end in itself, however—it’s not to be conflated with revelation. Reason doesn’t scrub the impact of cruelty and the way it continues to wreak havoc through that aura I mentioned earlier. Like a mutating virus, remnants of the initial shock have a way of resonating in perpetuity. One’s defenses are tasked with formulating new attack strategies to morph alongside the rehashing and the remembering. This cycle is reflected in Patrick’s frenetic, unsatisfiable thought patterns. In the last book, a bit of narration reads, “He was doing what he always did under pressure, observing everything, chattering to himself in different voices, circling the unacceptable feelings.” This description of Patrick’s mental habits serves additionally as an effective encapsulation of the narrative content of these compulsively readable novels.
St. Aubyn introduced me to a new word: denuded. It means to “strip (something) of its covering, possessions, or assets; make bare.” Drawing rooms rearranged to make way for legions of party guests can be denuded, as can forest floors in winter. It’s a perfect word in a wave of verbosity thematically charged by childhood defilement and disinheritance. Perhaps these novels were born out of that one word: denuded. Something could be denuded by an external force—violated, laid bare—or through internal conviction, like spring cleaning. At one point, the protagonist imagines “shaking off his unconscious, like a dog just out of the sea.” Instead of yearning for a blank slate, there’s this desire to shatter the medium and sweep away its remains.
The series closes with a sense of verbal exhaustion, a final accounting of what might remain unsaid. Maybe speechlessness—or, in his words, “inarticulacy” and the state of being “unconsolable”—was what St. Aubyn was hurtling towards all along. There are numerous instances, in the Patrick Melrose Novels, of rigid persons being humbled (denuded?) by a sudden loss of verbal faculties. Take this passage:
“Without a regiment of words, the barbarians, the burning roofs, the horses’ hooves beating down on fragile skulls. He was not himself any more; he was under the hooves. He could not be helpless; he could not be humiliated; it was too late to become somebody he didn’t know—the intimate horror of it.”
St. Aubyn will prove the impossibility of mastering the past through narrative, but only after the protagonist has sapped his own valiant attempt to do so. Then again, maybe he hasn’t. I sort of hope the series continues so that we can sit beside Patrick on his deathbed. Anyway, hyperarticulacy won’t save you, but far be it from St. Aubyn to chide the effort. Instead, he provides a case study for doing so with exceptional gusto.
I wonder if there’s a sort of brilliance that must be anchored to the vile in order to maintain a sense of representational integrity. I don’t mean to suggest that scenes of cruelty and terror are beautiful in themselves. I don’t think they are. As Patrick insists, “Cruelty is the opposite of love . . . not just some inarticulate version of it.” But perhaps, when it comes to artistic representation, there’s a quality of lucidity that can only be accessed through honest meditation on ugliness and dishonesty. In his project, St. Aubyn seems to take on the unpleasant work of confronting both in order to delimit, and bring into relief, what’s what. At a certain point, tired of all that meaning-making, you’ve got to just sit with the feeling in your stomach.
Patrick’s response to Philip Larkin’s adage? “Who says they don’t mean to?” I once saw a tourist, probably British, wearing the above-pictured t-shirt in Rome. I had to do a double-take. I found the words and their canvas staggering, surreal. Pasted on a t-shirt that would fit beside the “Fuck You, You Fucking Fuck” merch in Chinatown, I had no idea that the words were those of a revered poet’s. It was a really hot day and I sort of thought I was dreaming. I believe I stepped into the foyer of a wax museum to recover.