The poet of loathing, part three

Part one of this post on Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels is here and part two is here.

The satire really is brilliant, St. Aubyn's words are chosen with Wodehousian care. I've written about his prose briefly before, and the sharpness continues throughout the four novels. Here's a character reflecting on a diplomat he sees at a party:

Diplomats, thought Nicholas, long made redundant by telephones, still preserved the mannerisms of men who were dealing with great matters of state. He had once seen Jacques d'Alantour fold his overcoat on a banister and declare with all the emphasis of a man refusing to compromise over the Spanish Succession, "I shall put my coat here." He had then placed his hat on a nearby chair and added with an air of infinite subtlety, "But my hat I shall put here. Otherwise it may fall!" as if he were hinting that on the other hand some arrangement could be reached over the exact terms of the marriage.

In yesterday's post I mentioned Martin Amis; here's a passage that strikes me as worthy of his father, Kingsley. Patrick, having just been treated to a lengthy disquisition by a tremendous blowhard, thinks:

The loop of his monstrous vanity was complete. He had been talking about a book in which he wrote about his photographs of the animals he had shot with guns from his own magnificent collection, a collection photographed (alas, not by him) in the second book.

The only place St. Aubyn's satire falls short is when his characters visit America in Mother's Milk. Even there, it's not unfunny, but most of his targets are familiar or too broad (obesity, guns, the Bush administration), whereas the best of his satire of upper-crust British culture is more carefully targeted. Yet sometimes his writing can redeem even a tired topic, as in this scene in a coffee shop:

"Have a great one!" said Pete, a heavy-jawed blonde beast in an apron, sliding the coffee across the counter.

Old enough to remember the arrival of "Have a nice day," Patrick could only look with alarm on the hyperinflation of "Have a great one." Where would this Weimar of bullying cheerfulness end? "You have a profound and meaningful day now," he simpered under his breath as he tottered across the room with his giant mug. "Have a blissful one," he snapped as he sat at a table. "You all make sure you have an all-body orgasm," he whispered in a Southern accent, "and make it last." Because you deserve it. Because you owe it to yourself. Because you're a unique and special person. In the end, there was only so much you could expect from a cup of coffee and an uneatable muffin. If only Pete had confined himself to realistic achievements. "Have a cold shower," or "Try not to crash your car."

"Heavy-jawed blonde beast." "Weimar of bullying cheerfulness." "Simpering." Those are the words and phrases of someone who has taken care with every sentence; they, far more than topics, are what separate great satire from pedestrian.

So should you read Some Hope and Mother's Milk? I laughed a lot, cringed a lot, felt dirty merely for being human, was aghast at cruelty and astonished at more simple meanness, and was totally wrung out by the end. If that sounds fine to you, read away.

The poet of loathing, part two

Part one of this piece on Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels is here.

Even as the narrative jumps ably from character to character, the sense of disdain remains, couched in lacerating descriptions, as in this introduction, from the point of view of a Melrose family friend, of an acquaintance:

His hair was blow-dried until it rose and stiffened like a black meringue on top of his skull. His clothes did nothing to compensate for those natural disadvantages. If Vijay's favorite flared green trousers were a mistake, it was a trivial one compared to his range of lightweight jackets in chaotic tartan patterns, with flapless pockets sewn onto the outside. Still, any clothes were preferable to the sight of him in a bathing suit. Anne remembered with horror his narrow shoulders and their white pustules struggling to break through a thick pelt of wiry black hair.

Had Vijay's character been more attractive his appearance might have elicited pity or even indifference, but spending just a few days with him convinced Anne that each hideous feature had been molded by internal malevolence.

Because loathing is an effective driving force of comedy, of course, the novels are funny—but they can also be drainingly unpleasant, like some of Martin Amis's darker novels. And there is where my reservations about recommending them enter. They're frequently as funny as Evelyn Waugh, who himself could be quite negative about humanity. But St. Aubyn's depictions of Patrick's father's cruelty are far more explicit than Waugh (whether because of his own temperaments or the limitations of the times) ever approached in his descriptions of depravity. Especially in the early books, St. Aubyn creates some awkward juxtapositions between truly disturbing scenes of abuse and more distanced dissections of essentially trivial human folly that are played for laughs. St. Aubyn might argue that both real suffering and the mock-horrors of a fancy dinner party share roots in a failure to conceive of the reality of other people and their pain, but that wouldn't make the mismatched tones any less jarring. It's a real problem, but ultimately it's one I'm willing to put up with for St. Aubyn's comedy and characters. I wouldn't, however, dismiss out of hand someone who wasn't.

There is a payoff, of sorts, for being willing to stomach the darkness of the first couple of novels, as in the most recent two we see Patrick—by no means free of his inherited demons—actively trying to become a better, more complete person, a person he would not instinctively loathe. Aside from the sharpness of the writing, that desire for self-understanding is the real reason to read these St. Aubyn novels. We get a sense, not just from Patrick but from other characters as well, of a real mind sifting through its impressions, feelings, and thoughts in a constant effort to understand itself, make its way forward, and both accept and rein in its worst impulses. That caliber of analysis of human consciousness and motivation is uncommon; to find it married to laugh-out-loud satire will make me forgive many a jarring shift in tone.

The poet of loathing

One of the reasons I started this blog is that I enjoy recommending books. It was fun when I was a bookseller, and I still enjoy it, only now the beneficiaries (brunt-bearers?) are my friends and family.

But I have a lot of respect for the fact that everyone reads differently and for a wide range of reasons. People look for different things from books, and their tastes differ accordingly. So my recommendations tend to be hedged about with caveats: A Dance to the Music of Time is my favorite novel, but if you get a couple of hundred pages into it and feel like it's a slog, it's probably not for you; if uncertainty bothers you, stay away from Murakami; and if you don't enjoy the Francis Bacon biography in Aubrey's Brief Lives, then Aubrey is not for you. My caution is also driven by my knowledge that your reading time is probably more precious to you than mine is to me. After all, this is what I do with most of my free time; you, on the other hand, probably have plenty to do and don't want to waste it gritting your teeth at something I've blithely recommended.

Which brings me to Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels, the three brief books that make up his mid-90s Some Hope trilogy and 2005's Mother's Milk. Each of the novels takes up a discrete period in the life of Patrick Melrose, troubled scion of an extravagantly wealthy—though rapidly declining—English family. The first finds him as a boy of five, suffering the depredations of his astonishingly cruel father. The second, set in Patrick's twenties, is a grotesquely detailed narrative of a weekend in New York during which he tries, without openly forming the thought, to kill himself by overdosing on the heroin and cocaine to which he has become addicted. The third finds him, thirtyish and a bit wiser, attending a country house dinner party, while the fourth introduces him to the joys of parenthood while reacquainting him with the pains of being parented. We get just enough detail about the interstices of Patrick's life to get a sense of how it has unfolded when we haven't been looking, and the result is a surprisingly rounded portrait of a deeply unhappy young man trying desperately to come to some sort of acceptable terms with himself and the world.

And oh, that world. St. Aubyn has clearly made a lifelong study of loathing—self and other—and now he is both its poet and its comedian. The world as Patrick sees it is comprised of so much tawdriness, dishonesty, and just plain crap as to make a real engagement with it nearly impossible, unless modulated by drugs, sarcasm, or ironic distance; nothing can be taken on its merits, because under Patrick's unforgiving gaze, those merits will, surely, soon be discovered to be chimerical—if not sinister. And for Patrick, there are few kindred spirits, few who prefer to see the world's true, unvarnished bleakness:

Patrick took his drink over to a small book-lined alcove in the corner of the room. Scanning the shelves, his eye fell on a volume called The Journal of a Disappointed Man, and next to it a second volume called More Journals of a Disappointed Man, and finally, by the same author, a third volume entitled Enjoying Life. How could a man who had made such a promising start to his career have ended up writing a book called Enjoying Life? Patrick took the offending volume from the shelf and read the first sentence that he saw: "Verily, the flight of a gull is as magnificent as the Andes!"

"Verily," muttered Patrick.

More tomorrow.

Influences

From the Introduction to Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripedes (2006), translated by Anne Carson

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief. Ask a headhunter why he cuts off human heads. He'll say that rage impels him and rage is born of grief. The act of severing and tossing away the victim's head enables him to throw away the anger of all his bereavements. Perhaps you think this does not apply to you. Yet you recall the day your wife, driving you to your mother's funeral, turned left instead of right at the intersection and you had to scream at her so loud other drivers turned to look. When you tore off her head and threw it out the window they nodded, changed gears, drover away.

From Edward St. Aubyn's Bad News (1994), collected in Some Hope

Patrick looked down the avenue. It was like the opening shot of a documentary on overpopulation. He walked down the street, imagining the severed heads of passers-by rolling into the gutter in his wake.

If I find myself lopping off anyone's head (going all Judith on someone? all Highlander?) in the next few days, there's my alibi: look at what I was reading! It's nearly as bad as those video games Congress is always warning me about.

On the importance of a good prose style

A good dinner, a martini, a quiet hotel room with a wireless connection, a good book, and a Blogger account. What more could I want after a long week in New York of work and visiting friends?

So, as I've said before on this blog, I'm unlikely to enjoy a novel if I don't approve of the author's prose. The sentence, after all, is the first evidence I have by which to judge an author, and a writer who can't figure out the difference between a good sentence and a bad one is necessarily suspect. There are exceptions (see Jones, James), but usually what I want to know about a writer is, first of all, can he or she write?

The prose I like most straddles a fine line between careful observation and too much aestheticism, describing the world the way it is with near-perfect precision while not drawing attention to itself at the expense of the described. It's a product of continued, careful attention to the details that make up life and the language available to us for describing those details. At its best, such prose serves simultaneously to provide the background in which characters are placed for our contemplation and to convey a sense of those characters themselves. The following description of Dr. David Melrose, from the first page of Edward St. Aubyn's Never Mind (1992, collected in Some Hope), is a good example:

In his blue dressing gown, and already wearing dark glasses although it was still too early for the September sun to have risen above the limestone mountain, he directed a heavy stream of water from the hose he held in his left hand onto the column of ants moving busily through the gravel at his feet. His technique was well-established: he would let the survivors struggle over the wet stones, and regain their dignity for a while, before bringing the thundering water down on them again. With his free hand he removed a cigar from his mouth, its smoke drifting up through the brown and gray curls that covered the jutting bones of his forehead. He then arrowed the jet of water with his thumb to batter more efficiently an ant on whose death he was wholly bent.

Now, any half-competent high school English student could explain what St. Aubyn is conveying about the man--a doctor--in this paragraph, but that makes the achievement, concise and pointed, no less impressive. St. Aubyn has chosen the right details and the precise words in which to convey them. And it's not a matter of picking particularly unusual or erudite words, but of using words in a way that, in a sense, allows them to realize their full potential. Technique, struggle, thundering, arrowed, batter, wholly bent: these are not unusual words, but they are unusually well-chosen, creating an indelible picture of intense, almost finicky cruelty. Again, it's a matter of attentive observation of the world--or, in this case, of careful imagination of a character and how he would manifest himself in the world--followed by equal care applied to the words in which those observations are presented.

That sort of precision is the basis for the odd melding of minds of which the best reading consists, that sense of a real encounter with a previously unknown person who, through their prose, is showing you how they see the world. Encountering such clear evidence of care and intelligence in the first pages of a novel creates the trust that allows me to lend essential credence to the author's ideas about life and human relationships; I want to know what the author thinks because his prose has convinced me that those thoughts will repay the time I invest in them.

Further, in satire of this sort that trust, in turn, allows the author . . .

And yet, to Eleanor, David had seemed so different from the tribe of English snobs and distant cousins who hung around, ready for an emergency, or a weekend, full of memories that were not even their own, memories of the way their grandfathers had lived, which was not in fact how their grandfathers had lived. When she had met David, she thought that he was the first person who really understood her. Now he was the last person she would go to for understanding. It was hard to explain this change and she tried to resist the temptation of thinking that he had been waiting all along for her money to subsidize his fantasies of how he deserved to live. Perhaps, on the contrary, it was her money that had cheapened him. He had stopped his medical practice soon after their marriage. At the beginning, there had been talk of using some of her money to start a home for alcoholics. In a sense they had succeeded.

. . . to sink the stiletto with absolutely bloodless, surgical precision.

St. Aubyn seems to have the asperity, the cruel, unblinking honesty, of Waugh or Saki or Dawn Powell. Oh, I think I've found an author I'm going to really like.

It's a helluva town.

I'm in New York this week for work, so my reading is on the subway instead of the L. Some New York notes:

1) I started my trip, on the plane, with the least New York book I had handy, Wendell Berry's new novella, Andy Catlett (2006). Berry is a man of the country and the farm, unimpressed by cities, though he has lived in them at times, and Andy Catlett is in part a lament of everything that I can hear right now through my hotel window, the sounds of post-War America--fueled by petroleum, always on the go, mind always split between here and there, now and the future. It's an elegiac book, despite being written about a nine-year-old boy, and in picking it to bring, I guessed right: its slow cadences put me in the right mood for entering the city.

2) But once I got to my hotel, the Hudson, I had no choice but to leap with both feet into the future that to Berry is of such uncertain value, for the Hudson resembles nothing so much as a vision of tomorrow dreamed up by Wong Kar Wei and Haruki Murakami, with the addition of at least a dollop of Eurotrash. So back to Murakami I went, this time to Norwegian Wood (1987, translated into English in 2000).

And I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Norwegian Wood is haunted by a similar sense of loss to that which pervades Andy Catlett. A thirty-seven-year-old man looks back, from 1987, on a love of his 1960s youth:

Each time [that memory] appears, it delivers a kick to some part of my mind. "Wake up," it says. "I'm still here. Wake up and think about it. Think about why I'm still here." The kicking never hurts me. There's no pain at all. Just a hollow sound that echoes with each kick. . . . Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.

For all that Murakami's books get discussed as weird pageants of contemporary life, icons of postmodernism, the ones I've read have all featured narrators driven by loss, alienated from their past or from the world by people they can't have back, decisions they can't unmake, times they can't recapture. There is a similarity in tone between Murakami and Berry, or Murakami and Anthony Powell, or Proust, that I never expected when I first opened his novels.

3) For weeks, I've been trying to remember the name of a contemporary British author, whose multi-volume family saga has been reviewed favorably, and whose prose style seemed like one I would appreciate. Take this exchange, for example:

"Imagine wanting to talk to someone on the phone," said Eleanor. "I dread it."

"Youth," said Nicholas tolerantly.

"I dreaded it even more in my youth, if that's possible."

Wanting to read this unknown author's collected novels, and knowing what its spine looked like, I'd even gone so far as to quickly look over all the fiction shelves at 57th Street Books in an attempt to circumvent my faulty memory, but to no avail. Then last night, while waiting to meet some friends, I wandered into Three Lives and Company on 10th Street and there it was, stacked high on the front table of staff favorites: Edward St. Aubyn's Some Hope (2003).

When fate gives you such clear instructions to buy a book, you are required to do so, fidelity to your local bookstore and lack of space in your luggage be damned.

4) As a longtime Joseph Mitchell fan, I talked the aforementioned friends into visiting McSorley's Old Ale House last night, and I was pleased that it was all I could have hoped for, abjuring modernity while somehow avoiding the deadly taints of kitsch or irony. The urinals alone--deep, tall, and majestic--made me feel young and insignificant, part of a lesser, fallen generation. We can't even pee like they used to pee.

Then we proceeded to irk our waiter with our frequent indecision in the face of his queries. It was hard to fault him: after all, one's only choices are light or dark, have another round or don't. And again I felt a failure. Joseph Mitchell would have had no trouble deciding. William Maxwell would have had no trouble deciding. Hell, had they allowed women back then, Dorothy Parker would have had no trouble deciding.

A couple of times, our waiter simply decided for us, always in the affirmative, always for the dark, and he was right, of course. We drank what was put in front of us and talked, of, among other topics, baseball, on which subject we were not the only patrons dwelling on this mid-December night. Imagining people talking of Ruth and DiMaggio in their day, just as we talked of Pettite and Giambi, made me feel a bit better about our efforts as patrons.

But my confidence received its largest boost when, as we made our thanks and headed for the door, the waiter chucked me on the elbow and said, "That's a nice suit."

Had I had my proper hat, I would have tipped it to Joseph Mitchell as I left.