At Last by Edward
St. Aubyn is the fourth novel about Patrick Melrose and his family; the others
are Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and
Mother’s Milk. You don’t need to read
them to enjoy At Last although it
would help.
St. Aubyn, like the characters in the novel, comes from a
wealthy English family. He, like Patrick, was raped by his father as a child.
He, like Patrick, is a recovering drug addict and alcoholic. Indeed, given the
facts of St. Aubyn’s life, I find it remarkable he is alive and functioning,
let alone that he writes brilliantly
In 2006, he told an interview
from The Observer, “Once I started
writing, I decided to stop the analysis. I didn't need it any more. But I knew
it was good because I went to see my analyst after making a suicide attempt. I
was very, very precarious and then I felt a lot better. I stopped feeling mad;
there was some sense of order.” The reporter asked whether writing its own kind of therapy? “If it
does have any therapeutic value,” said St. Aubyn, “the only way to get access
to it is to write without any therapeutic intent. You transform experience
into, for want of a better word, art. I'm interested in structure and
character. Otherwise it would be very boring for everyone else.”
Which is my feeling about
alcoholic, or drug-addicted, or insane (or all three) main characters. Because
they can do anything, have little or no self-awareness, and have little or no
thought of consequences they are too easy to write, and as St. Aubyn says not
interesting. It is, I think, the problem with fiction versus reportage. Our
real lives are filled with accidents, extraordinary coincidences, inexplicable
events. A novelist has to be careful about using these attributes of reality or
readers are liable to feel cheated. Most readers expect a novel to make a
certain kind of sense. A novel can do things reality cannot (for example, give
us a person’s private thoughts, contradict known physical laws, invent
impossible landscapes), but it has to make sense on its own terms. An
extraordinary coincidence that becomes dinner table conversation in your lived
life will cause a reader to throw your novel across a room.
An alcoholic, drug-addicted, or
insane main character is easy to write because you have no constraints. The
character by her nature doesn’t have to make “sense.” She can be one way today,
another way tomorrow. Her primary wants can change five times on a page. She
has no solidity, no verisimilitude. Somehow, however, through the glitter of his writing
and our access to Patrick’s thoughts St. Aubyn manages to make him engaging
and sympathetic.
The action of At Last takes place during a few hours
of a single day—the funeral of Patrick’s mother and a family gathering
afterward. While Patrick is the main character, the point of view shifts from
character to character within a chapter and even on a page, although I had no
trouble keeping up with who was observing what. I did have some trouble at the
beginning of the book keeping the characters and their relationships straight,
I’ve mentioned St. Aubyn’s
writing. Here are a couple examples:“Emily Price had three main
drawbacks: she was incapable of saying please, incapable of saying thank you
and incapable of saying sorry, all the while creating a surge in the demand for
these expressions.” “He knew as deeply as he knew
anything that sedation was a prelude to anxiety, stimulation the prelude to
exhaustion, and consolation the prelude to disappointment, so he lay on the red
velvet soft and did nothing to distract himself from the news of his mother’s death.”
Most of the characters are
thoroughly dislikeable. They are cutting, snobbish (with little to be snobbish
about), and self-centered. The exceptions are Patrick’s two sons and his
ex-wife. Part of the book’s enjoyment,
of course, is the nastiness. But also St. Aubyn’s observations and descriptions.
By the end, I felt that Patrick—now an orphan, now divorced, now sober, now
(relatively) poor—has a positive future. Altogether satisfying.
