The vicious brilliance of Edward St. Aubyn
Mother’s Milk is a brilliantly vicious novel about a man (de)formed by his casually monstrous parents. This is the fourth novel in the autobiographical Melrose series by Edward St. Aubyn. It is so good, we had to stop reading at page 150 and read something happy until the acid had drained out of our soul. Even sentimental dreck would’ve been a relief after this razor blade prose.
Talk about the rich being different: the narrator was fucked over in every sense by his upper class parents, and as he enters middle age he lives in fear of fucking over his own kids. We tend to take a romantic/aspirational view of the upper classes—from Henry James to Evelyn Waugh, Edith Wharton to Downton Abbey. St. Aubyn, whose people have been aristocrats since the Norman Conquest, gives the insider view, direct from the bile ducts.
It is so horrible and so beautiful we don’t know whether to read the other books or run screaming from them.
Read with caution, but by all means read.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
March 6th, 2012 at 23:12
do you recommend that we start with the first book or it doesn’t matter?