At Last (St. Aubyn) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
The thing that everyone loves about this man...is that his prose has an easy charm that masks a ferocious, searching intellect. As a sketcher of character, his wit—whether turned against pointless members of the aristocracy or hopeless crack dealers—is ticklingly wicked. As an analyser of broken minds and tired hearts he is as energetic, careful and creative as the perfect shrink. And when it comes to spinning a good yarn, whether over the grand scale of three volumes or within a single page of anecdote, he has a natural talent for keeping you on the edge of your seat.... [An] amazing book.
Melissa Katsoulis - London Times


St. Aubyn’s technique is to crystallise emotional intensity into sentences of arctic beauty, which can be caustically witty or brutal. His novels are uncommonly well controlled, and thus their impact is all the more powerful…. In At Last this crystallisation and control are on glittering display…. We have reached the pinnacle of a series that has plunged into darkness and risen towards light. At Last is both resounding end and hopeful beginning.
Philip Womack - Telegraph (UK)


For fans of the Melrose cycle, At Last provides some of the exultation and relief of watching [a] sailor, so often nearly drowned, bob, gasping, to the surface…if this is, as St. Aubyn's publisher claims, the "culmination" of the Melrose cycle, we can only wish Patrick well and be thankful that his travails have furnished the material for some of the most perceptive, elegantly written and hilarious novels of our era.
Francine Prose - New York Times Book Review


[T]he final installment of a remarkable cycle of novels…which chronicle the life of Mr. St. Aubyn's alter ego, Patrick, while creating a glittering (and scathing) portrait of the upper-class British world his family inhabits. The books are written with an utterly idiosyncratic combination of emotional precision, crystalline observation and black humor, as if one of Evelyn Waugh's wicked satires about British aristos had been mashed up with a searing memoir of abuse and addiction, and injected with Proustian meditations on the workings of memory and time…the Melrose books underscore [St. Aubyn's] gift for lassoing the extremes of human experience in coolly chiseled language; for using irony and exactitude to reconfigure the raw, painful facts of life into an art that somehow manages to be affecting, alarming and, yes, amusing, all at the same time.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


St. Aubyn writes with exquisite control and a brilliant comic touch.... An intelligent and surprisingly hopeful novel, a fitting conclusion to one of the best fictional cycles in contemporary fiction.
Anthony Domestico - Boston Globe


[O]ne of the most amazing reading experiences I've had in a decade. After all the suffering and torment and despair that Patrick Melrose has been through over the years, [St. Aubyn] leaves him in a very interesting place, and he does it all with his incredible examination of the sweep of time and the way our understanding of people changes over decades. All of that is done with this incredible, biting, witty, hilarious prose style, the elegant, classic English sentences that he writes and these amazing put-downs, and he's great at dissecting an entire social world with a really wicked scalpel.
Michael Chabon - Los Angeles Times


St. Aubyn’s skill with characterization, his dissection of how a personality warps, settles, or improves over time, is nowhere more evident than in his aging of Patrick, whose mood and mental state are a gauge for the tone of each novel.... At Last is far less dramatic than any previous Melrose book, although the humor and perfectly observed dialogue remain. Its calm is entirely suited to the wisdom Patrick Melrose has painfully, finally earned.
Victoria Beale - New Republic


It's tough competition for the most-underrated writer in the English language—there's plenty of neglect to go around—but if you put a Colt Commander to my head, I might well say it's St. Aubyn, the chronically under-published chronicler of abuse, dysfunction, alcoholism and worse in the English upper classes. At Last is the  final novel, one thinks, in his series about his alter ego, the neurotic Patrick Melrose. It's pretty much a lock to be one of the funniest, saddest, most beautiful books of the year.
Lev Grossman - Time


In this fifth and final book in St. Aubyn's "Patrick Melrose" series, ...Patrick attends the funeral of his mother, who died after a lingering illness.... As his story ends, we find him reexamining his life. Can he connect with his sons? He would never hurt them as his father hurt him, but he is hurting them just the same by being so remote. Verdict: This well-written work has dark undertones and subtle, cutting humor, like an Augusten Burroughs novel with less zaniness and more cruelty. For those willing to tackle an emotionally difficult, unflinching narrative. —Shaunna Hunter, Hampden-Sydney Coll. Lib., VA
Library Journal


With this title, St. Aubyn caps his five-volume cycle of Melrose novels. ...[E]vents in At Last take place over the course of a single day; in this case, the day of Patrick’s mother’s funeral. Despite his loss and his reduced circumstances...Patrick has “at last” found a measure of peace. With lacerating humor and razor-sharp imagery, St. Aubyn continues to work out his themes: the follies of the British upper class, “the psychological impact of inherited wealth,” the complex dynamics between parent and child. —Mary Ellen Quinn
Booklist


A London funeral stirs up a lot of memories but few epiphanies in this British author's latest, which concludes [the Patrick Melrose] trilogy.... Now, after two mute years in a wheelchair, his mother Eleanor has died, making Patrick a 45-year-old orphan. The action, such as it is, covers the crematorium funeral and subsequent reception; mixed in are family memories.... Patrick, more forgiving now, sees his "supposed persecutors," his parents, as "unhappy children" themselves. It's a curious conclusion. St. Aubyn tries for a Muriel Spark kind of black comedy but lacks her finesse.
Kirkus Reviews