Patrick Melrose Novels (St. Aubyn)

Book Reviews
Like Waugh, St. Aubyn writes with exquisite control and a brilliant comic touch…Patrick often seems like a Philip Roth hero transplanted into a world of English privilege… The Patrick Melrose Series forms an exhaustive study of cruelty: its varieties, its motivations, its consequences, its moral implications.
Boston Globe


Implausibly brilliant speech… The striking gap between, on the one hand, the elegant polish of the narration, the silver rustle of these exquisite sentences, the poised narrowness of the social satire and, on the other hand, the screaming pain of the family violence inflicted on Patrick makes these books some of the strangest of contemporary novels …This prose, whose repressed English control is admired by everyone from Alan Hollinghurst to Will Self, is drawn inexorably back to a fearful instability, to the nakedness of infancy.
James Wood - The New Yorker


Coinciding with the publication of At Last, this omnibus edition shows that St. Aubyn’s five Patrick Melrose novels may well constitute one of the most ambitious novel cycles since Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. Where Powell wrote about a wide swath of 20th-century English social history, St. Aubyn’s milieu is more focused and constrained, detailing the life of the scion of the eccentric, wealthy, and cruel David and Eleanor Melrose.... This cycle is no ordinary family saga, or even that of an extraordinary family (which the Melrose clan certainly is); plot summaries don’t touch on St. Aubyn’s gift. Though the author has clearly mined his own experience, he has refined it into something exquisite, an exploration of consciousness and the journey from the helplessness of childhood to “the pure inevitability of things being as they were,” as elegant a definition of acceptance as anyone is likely to write. And his serious purpose is buoyed by an abundant wit, laugh-out-loud funniness, and piercing observations into the world of privilege and entitlement.
Publishers Weekly


This volume introduces American readers to the first four Melrose novels—Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother’s Milk—published in Great Britian from 1992 to 2006.... Mother’s Milk was a Man Booker finalist, making this volume especially welcome for readers who savor literary British fiction. —Mary Ellen Quinn
Booklist


A brew of romans a clef set amid a sparklingly decadent upper-crust English background, the novels are a mordant portrait of a class that St. Aubyn loathes but is undeniably his own. In each novel we read a kind of status report on Patrick's progress, one in which his growing desire to come to grips with his legacy and the shadow of maturity does battle with a pathological case of self-loathing, an appetite for sex and self-medication. Bleak as the material may sound, the Melrose novels are modern masterworks of social comedy.
Eric Banks - Book Forum