Lightening up after a masterpiece
St. Aubyn finds an easy target in book prizes
How do you follow up a masterpiece? In pop music, the template is clear: An acclaimed debut introduces the artist and his or her whole life of struggle up to that point. The second album then documents the price of success, the burden of fame and the hotel rooms trashed on the tour. Not only is the material unrelatable, there’s much less of it to mine.
That’s not a perfect metaphor for Edward St. Aubyn — which is a shame because no one does perfect metaphors like Edward St. Aubyn — but it’s sturdy enough to illustrate how this new book compares to the British writer’s magnum opus.
First, the masterpiece: With his five Patrick Melrose novels published between 1992 and 2012, St. Aubyn cast his demons onto the printed page in a manner both of our age and shudderingly not. The idea of confessional memoir as therapy is the sort of thing that would make Melrose, an acknowledged standin for St. Aubyn, heave. As he writes of a character in Lost for Words, “A thousand hours of psychotherapy had done their familiar work, making an intellectually obvious truth into a deeply felt one.”
In spite, or more likely because, of this intense selfawareness, in Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother’s Milk and At Last, St. Aubyn draws a precise and devastating portrait of an abused child’s lifelong journey to rid himself of his spectacularly horrific father and wilfully ignorant mother. The books succeed sentence by cut-glass sentence; there is no wallowing and no flinching from what they did to him. Patrick lives — sometimes purposefully, sometimes because of botched suicide attempts — in the shadows of monsters.
Whether there are two monsters or three casting shade is the central question of the series: Is he his own person or the product of his parents?
The books are heavy, as you’d expect a series about child abuse to be, but they are worth the weight. There are gems worthy of Waugh throughout — a devastating portrait of the casually cruel Princess Margaret; a drugfuelled tour of Manhattan even druggier than Martin Amis’s Money; metaphors that open new windows into human failings. Above all there is the real sense that you are watching language being precisely and painstakingly used to explain something nearly inexplicable.
Now, the book at hand: Lost For Words is not heavy, and it’s not a masterpiece. It is a comic riff on the machinations behind a major fiction prize that’s not unlike the one Edward St. Aubyn’s Mother’s Milk was nominated for, but did not win in 2006. The jury for the Elysian Prize is composed of know-nothings, has-beens and never-wases who see their job as primarily political.
The actual quality of the books is, of course, not an issue, because no one bothers to read them. “The point was to build a consensus and come up with a vision of the sort of Britain they all wanted to project with the help of this prize: diverse, multicultural, devolutionary, and of course, encouraging to young writers.” Of primary import is to reflect the zeitgeist, to be relevant.
This description basically fits any arts prize, anywhere. Case in point, our own Governor General’s Literary Award way back in 1970, when Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business — an international critical and commercial success — lost out to The Ancestors by Dave Godfrey. As Roy Macskimming wrote of that year in his history of Canadian publishing, “the Zeitgeist celebrated the new and radical, and nothing was newer at that point than Godfrey’s edgy, iconoclastic style.” And now the winner is long out of print while the loser stands as the definitive English-Canadian novel of the last century.
All of which is to say that while the book-award-industrial complex is an obvious target, it’s one that should still be hit as often as possible, if only to counteract the massive publicity push that is the modern literary prize. And St. Aubyn gives it a good whack, most effectively in his excerpts of some of the horrible nominees. Ribbing of Hilary Mantel and Irvine Welsh stands out, as does a nice parody of a Canadian nature novel called A Year in the Wild, which reads like “a guidebook to the fauna and flora of the Canadian outback.”
Fighting his way through this carnival is Sam Black, a promising novelist who has written a “bildungsroman of impeccable anguish and undisguised autobiographical origin.” Black’s agonizing relationship with fellow writer Katherine Burns occasionally seems like part of another book wedged in between the misunderstandings and caricatures. It gives nothing away to say he doesn’t win the Elysian, or that this isn’t much of a disappointment.
Edward St. Aubyn is enjoying long-overdue media attention in North America with Lost for Words, and the book is a decent introduction to his work. But make no mistake: Though he’s perceptive and clever on the life of a writer, he’s all that and more when he writes on life, full stop.