Kingsley, Martin, and fuck off!

One other thing I admire about Martin Amis's Experience, which I wrote about on Monday, is its clear-eyed assessment of Kingsley's fiction. Martin is a fan, claiming (not unreasonably) that his father was the best postwar comic novelist (to say nothing of his position as "the poet laureate of the hangover"). While he acknowledges that not all of Kingsley's novels are wholly successful (and that many of the failures are deeply misogynistic), he finds something to admire in nearly all of them, and what's more, he's convincing in his argument, deftly illustrating points (in the fiction and the life) with well-chosen examples that make you want to read the novels in question. (Fortunately for all of us, the New York Review of Books is in the process of republishing a number of them, starting of course with Lucky Jim and the bitter but admirable and hilarious Old Devils and moving on from there. Gods, of all stripes, bless the NYRB Classics.)

The following passage, from The Old Devils is probably my favorite that Martin cites. Charlie, the protagonist, is rescued from a tortuous public dedication of a statue by his friend Alun with his car. As they drive off, Alun pokes his head out of the window and tells Pugh, the Welsh-loving American who has made the dedication such a stultifying experience, to fuck off. Then:

"They do say fuck off in America, don't they?" asked Alun anxiously.

"I'm sure they understand it."

. . . Alun laughed quietly for a short time, shaking his head in indulgent self-reproach. . . . He lowered his voice and went on, "Hey--timing really was important for that. I got badly caught in Kilburn once telling a Bulgarian short-story writer . . . to fuck off for two or three minutes while the chap driving the open car I was sitting in turned round in the cul-de-sac I hadn't noticed we were at the end of. Amazing how quickly the bloom fades on fuck off, you know. Say it a couple of times running and you've got out of it nearly all you're going to get."

"And there's not a lot you can go on to later," said Charlie.

"Well exactly."

Profanity aside, that last exchange could almost be between Bertie and Jeeves. And what comic joy there is in the phrase "Amazing how quickly the bloom fades on fuck off, you know." It feels wholly like an of-the-moment thought, something that presents itself in the moment as an actual revelation, while also being utterly ridiculous.

And now I'm going to have to read more Kingsley.

{Side note: I was surprised to learn that both Kingsley and Martin admired Iris Murdoch and thought her the best female novelist of her generation. I think I had known at one point, but forgotten, Kingsley's admiration, but I was surprised to be reminded--I would have thought her melodrama and muddles too much for him. But of course there are plenty of people who've accused Murdoch of misogyny, too . . . }

Martin and Kingsley Amis

Reading Martin Amis's memoir, Experience (2000), in the United States thirteen years after its publication is a strange experience. If you were to chart its primary concerns, two of the top five--the UK tabloid fascination with Amis's personal life, wealth, and success; and his teeth--are likely to be of little interest, to the point at times of near bewilderment, to current Stateside readers. Amis is a name here, of course, but his fame is nothing like what it is in the UK, and neither is our media's attentiveness to writers, period. Jonathan Franzen's Oprah diss was the stuff of news (and, irritatingly, remains so), but if he were to change agents and secure a giant book deal, then get all his teeth replaced, would that be news? Seems unlikely.

Add Amis's reflections on the murder of his cousin Lucy Partington at the hands of a notorious serial killer, meditations that, for all Amis's seemingly honest emotion, can't help but feel out of place, and you've got a strange book.

But then there are those sentences. Amis is a devotee of Nabokov and Bellow, and it shows in nearly every line. And then there is the entertainingly fractured, footnoted structure. And the near-constant self-deprecation, which nicely balances the name-dropping. And Kingsley. So much Kingsley.

No Kingsley fan should skip Martin's book: the portrait of Kingsley in its pages is memorable, and while not seeming sugar-coated, much more likable than the usual picture of a pathologically promiscuous drunk. Martin's Kingsley is, no doubt, a pathologically promiscuous drunk, and an ever-increasingly reactionary one at that, but he is also a father, and in his back and forth with his son, as well as the occasional glimpses of genuine vulnerability that Martin captures, he seems less a monster than a suffering misanthrope.

You get all of that, and a wonderful display of Martin's way with a sentence, in a passage from late in Kingsley's life about the struggle to get him across the street after a long and liquid lunch. First, Martin sets the scene:

When I was young my father gave me a tip about lunchtime drinking and the shadow it cast over dinnertime drinking. Take everything you had at lunch (he said), double it, and imagine you swallowed it in one at 5:55 pm.

In such a state, "an exponential alcoholic kick-in of trouncing efficiency," Martin and Kingsley set off:

On a traffic island in the middle of the Edgeware Road (that eternally disreputable thoroughfare, with its northwestward trek from mammonic Marble Arch, past the pubs and offices and slot-arcades beneath the Westway, past Little Venice, until it subsides into Maida Vale, where we lived in a house with Philip and Jane, thirty years ago), Kingsley fell over. And this was no brisk trip or tumble. It was a work of colossal administration. First came a kind of slow-leak effect, giving me the immediate worry that Kingsley, when fully deflated, would spread out into the street on both sides of the island, where there were cars, trucks, sneezing buses. Next, as I grabbed and tugged, he felt like a great ship settling on its side: would it right itself, or go under? Then came an impression of overall dissolution and the loss of basic physical coherence. I groped around him, looking for places to shore him up, but every bit of him was falling, dropping, seeking the lowest level, like a mudslide.

I got him home in the end. He found some balance, some elevation; I wedged my shoulder in his armpit, and slowly hauled. The incident never stopped being about 3 percent comic. Even with his face at knee height, and his eyes stark with apprehension, like a man disappearing into a swamp, he never lost that glimmer of astonished amusement at what was happening to him--at the weight he carried, at the greed of gravity, at the wheel of years. Dad, you're too old for this shit, I might have said to him. But why bother? Do you think he didn't know?

There's an element of this that is certainly far from comic. At the same time, it's hard to imagine Kingsley, observing such a situation involving another, not instantly grasping its much more than 3% comic potential, which Martin's metaphors (particularly "like a man disappearing into a swamp") hint at. Good god, may none of us ever be in that situation--but should we be, let's be ready to laugh at ourselves.

If Saturday night’s all right for fighting, can Friday night be all right for cursing?, or, Oh, no--another &*@#@(! blog post!

Though I’ve never claimed that this is a family blog--you thousands of teenage fans hear that? Time to leave here and go back to Pingu!--I do tend to refrain from swearing most of the time. It’s just not part of my writing voice, so I don’t do much of it in print.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate some blue language, a bit of salt with my substance, especially when delivered by a master. {Scroll down on that one to the bottom of the post for July 8, 2000. You’ll be glad you did.} And over the past ten days, I’ve encountered a handful of oddities relating to swearing that have led to this batch of not particularly well-connected notes.

1 It started with an entry in Kinsgley Amis’s idiosyncratic, chatty style and usage guide, The King’s English (1997). The entry, “Four-letter words,” included this passage:

I have forgotten when I first said or made a character say fuck in print, but no one seemed to notice or care, any more than they did when my son Martin used the word several dozen times in one page in a novel published in 1978.

The swipe at Martin reminded me of a footnote to a piece Martin wrote about J. G. Ballard back in 1997: he noted that Kingsley would give a writer one bad book before giving up on them. “His son,” Martin wrote, “he gave two.” If, however, Kingsley was counting swear words in 1978--Success, it must have been--then it seems he subjected himself to at least three of Martin’s novels before bagging it.

2 All of which makes me unable to resist sharing an incident from Zachary Leader’s biography of Kingsley that I first noted a couple of years ago: once when Kingsley fell asleep on a beach, his wife wrote on his ample stomach in lipstick,

One Fat Englishman. Will Fuck Anything.

A writer for the Literary Review who reviewed the biography characterized Kingsley’s guiding philosophy in terms that match those in vulgarity and ethos both:

If it moves, fuck it. If it doesn’t, drink it.

It almost makes Martin’s protagonist in The Rachel Papers seem upstanding and honorable.

3 Earlier in the week, profanity played a part in a crucial series between the then first-place Cincinnati Reds and my beloved St. Louis Cardinals, who trailed the Reds by one game as they entered the series. Asked before the first game whether a sore leg might keep him out of the game, Reds second baseman Brandon Philips had this to say:

I'd play against these guys with one leg. We have to beat these guys. I hate the Cardinals. All they do is bitch and moan about everything, all of them, they're little bitches, all of 'em. I really hate the Cardinals. Compared to the Cardinals, I love the Chicago Cubs. Let me make this clear--I hate the Cardinals.

This, as you might have expected, got the Cardinals a bit fired up, which resulted in a bench-clearing brawl in Tuesday’s game--and, more important, a masterful sweep of the series by the Cards.

None of which would merit mention on this blog, had the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s deputy managing editor not gone to the trouble a few days later of explaining why the paper decided to print the quote as uttered, swear words and all. The explanation is interesting, as is editor Steve Parker’s note that a search of the archives returned hundreds of uses of the word “bitch” in recent decades--which surprised me (and, it seems, him), given how squeamish American newspapers are about swearing.

Newspapers like the Cincinnati Enquirer, for example, which riddled Phillips’s quote with so many evasions that it begins to sound like they’re a kid telling the teacher about somethind bad they heard Brandon say on the playground:

I hate the Cardinals. All they do is (b-word) and moan about everything, all of them, they're little (b-words), all of 'em.

None of which, however, matches up to the bowdlerization once performed on a quote from Cardinals reliever Steve Kline--it’s Item #3 in this post.

Oh, and Brandon Phillips? He went 2 for 14 in the series. Oops.

4 The only suitable way to end this post is by sending you to this Wikipedia entry, which demonstrates yet again, should you still need to be convinced, the useless glory that can result from the combination of free time, obsession, and the Internet.

Have a great fucking weekend.

To be read, may I take the liberty to suggest, with a dry gin martini

{Photos by rocketlass.}

Some offerings from the I've Been Reading Lately bar today: belly up and pick your poison.

1 Having just written about the Amises, I was glad to discover last night in the new issue of Bookforum an article by Alexander Waugh on Kingsley Amis's books on booze . . . of which there are not one, not two, but three! My first reaction was that Amis, a champion tippler (whose monthly bill for Scotch topped £1,000 in the 1970s) and the best writer on drunkenness since Noah first snarfed the grape and rucked up his robes, ought to be a good source for recommendations about drink, but Waugh rightly questions that assumption:

[I]t is worth ruminating for a moment on the question of whether a person who drinks as much as Kingsley Amis did is, or is not, a reliable expert on the subject. You would think that someone who had devoted so much of his life to alcohol would know a thing a two about it—and he certainly did—but are the taste recommendations of alcoholics useful to people who drink only moderately? As an immoderate imbiber myself, I am not the best placed to answer this question, though I cannot imagine that the average two-glasses-of-wine-a-day man is going to think very highly of some of Amis’s recommendations—Bloody Mary with tomato ketchup and no Tabasco, red wine with lemonade, a pint of Guinness mixed with gin and ginger beer (this he erroneously claims to be the invention of my grandfather Evelyn Waugh), Scotch whisky with fried eggs. And who but a committed alcoholic could possibly wish for a glass of the “Tigne Rose,” an Amis cocktail made up of one tot of gin, one tot of whisky, one tot of rum, one tot of vodka, and one tot of brandy? Alcoholics have special cravings that obfuscate, warp, and exaggerate their tastes and, like committed sex maniacs, are often prepared to try almost anything.

The scariest thing about that paragraph for me is that I've encountered—though thank god not tasted—a tomato ketchup Bloody Mary, prepared by Jose, one of the hash-addled South African moving men with whom I shared a horrid travelers' house in north London's Neasden neighborhood in the mid-90s. Not only did Jose seem to have no qualms about making—and heartily quaffing—the aforementioned abomination, he didn't even seem to realize that his concoction was unusual. Thinking of its corn-syrup-thickened redness oozing down his chin still induces a shudder.

2 From Amis's book On Drink (1972), Waugh quotes the following brutally perceptive passage about hangovers:

When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. You are not sickening for anything, you have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a shit you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is, and there is no use crying over spilt milk.

Even those among us whose deepest appreciation for drink is more notional—even literary—than actual can recognize familiar elements in that description, however much we might prefer to banish them from memory.

3 Since Anthony Powell featured in the discussion of the Amises the other night, I ought to note that Powell, too, is very good when writing on drink and drunks. On the recommendation of Ed at the Dizzies, we've been slowly making our way through the 1997 BBC adaptation of A Dance to the Music of Time, and one of the many surprising pleasures of the film has been the skill at playing drunk evinced by the actor cast as the hopeless alcoholic Charles Stringham; his wide-eyed efforts to effect a hopeless pretense of sobriety on entering a room elicit equal parts sympathetic pain and horrified laughter.

4 At various times in Dance, many of Powell's characters make appearances while deep in their cups. I particularly like this description, from At Lady Molly's (1957), of the extremely minor character Hegarty, who is employed alongside Nick Jenkins as a screenwriter by a dismally shabby film studio:

Hegarty was also in poor form that day. He had been a script-writer most of his grown-up life—burdened by then with three, if not four, wives, to all of whom he was paying alimony—and he possessed, when reasonably sober, an extraordinary facility for constructing film scenarios. That day, he could not have been described as reasonably sober. Groaning, he had sat all the afternoon in the corner of the room facing the wall. We were working on a stage play that had enjoyed a three-weeks West End run twenty or thirty year before, the banality of which had persuaded some director that it would "make a picture." This was the ninth treatment we had produced between us. At last, for the third time in an hour, Hegarty broke out in a cold sweat. He began taking aspirins by the handful. It was agreed to abandon work for the day.

5 In his notebook, which was published in 2001 as A Writer's Notebook, Powell vented a bit, from bitter experience, about film executives:

One of the reasons that films are so bad is that producers assume that a class of picture-goer exists, stupider and slower witted and more vulgar than themselves, which would, of course, be impossible.

Invective is such a pleasure when balanced and properly coiled, concealing until the last the venomous stinger.

6 For a long time, I've vaguely imagined that the drunken Hegarty incorporated characteristics of F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom Powell met while working in Hollywood. Checking the third volume of Powell's autobiography, Faces in My Time (1980), however, I find that the two never actually worked together; in fact, their acquaintance was limited to a single long and amiable lunch. But I did discover the following description of Fitzgerald, which you'll surely agree is timely:

His air could be though a trifle sad, not, as sometimes described at this period, in the least broken-down. When, years later, I came to know Kingsley Amis, his appearance recalled Fitzgerald's to me, a likeness photographs of both confirm.

Powell also describes memorably the tone in which Hollywood figures spoke of Fitzgerald:

It was as if Lazarus, just risen from the dead, were to be looked on as of somewhat doubtful promise as an aspiring scriptwriter.

7 To wrap this up, I'll turn to back to Powell's notebooks, which include plenty of entries touching on drink.

At a party, make up your mind whether you are going to go all out for women, food or drink. You can't have all three.

In quarantine for a hangover.

"I might come in and have a drink with you." "You might come in; a drink depends on my hospitality."

Life is a comedy for those who drink, and a tragedy for those who eat.

A wine snob boasts that he has some bottles corked with corks made from Proust's soundproof room.

A rich left-winger who put his trust in Marx and kept his sherry dry.

A bore, who at worst would explain the meaning of life.

Though the final entry, you'll have noticed, didn't explicitly mention alcohol, I included it nonetheless; I find it nearly impossible to imagine the bore reaching his worst state without the timely assistance of strong drink.

And in this corner, Anthony Dymoke Powell!

Though I understand that lists of the best this, the most that, and the greatest the other have an ineluctable appeal to editors--as well as an undeniable role to play in warming the air around barstools--I generally don't get too worked up about them. If this blog as a whole argues for anything, it's for the pleasures of creating one's own canon, pawing the stacks of the world's literatures to determine--and shout to the rooftops about--what belongs nearest one's own heart. It thus seems barely worth arguing about the vagaries of quasi-objective rankings, especially if I don't know the underlying aesthetic sensibilities of the compilers.

A few days ago, however, Ed from the Dizzies called on my services as a fan of Anthony Powell to argue against Powell's placement in the twentieth position, one behind Martin Amis, on the Times's list of the fifty greatest postwar British writers. Having been thus entered into the lists on behalf of my favorite writer, how could I refuse?

In some ways, the ranking seems absurd on its face: Amis's three or so good novels look paltry next to the twelve-novel stack of Powell's masterpiece A Dance to the Music of Time--let alone Powell's early and late comic novels, which stand at least equal with some of Evelyn Waugh's lesser works.

But that doesn't quite seem fair to Amis's novels, some of which I like a lot. While nowhere near as good as his father's best, Lucky Jim (1954), Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers (1973) is still one of the funniest books I've ever read--and, much like Joe Matt's comics, it's impressive in its ability to make me squirm with shame at certain elements of maleness I can't deny having at times shared with the feckless young narrator. London Fields (1989), though it ultimately shambles to a messy, disappointing conclusion, is nearly redeemed by the sheer audacious electricity of its prose.

And while I tend to prefer Powell's looser, more anecdotal approach when it comes to writing criticism, Amis's critical writing is also sharp and thoughtful, driven by an appreciation of precisely crafted descriptive prose and alert to humbuggery (yet without descending nearly so often as Christopher Hitchens into smug self-righteousness). The opening paragraphs of his reappraisal of J. G. Ballard's Crash on the occasion of the release of the David Cronenberg film give a good sample of the latter characteristic, accompanied by another trademark of Amis the reviewer: self-deprecation.

I reviewed Crash when it came out in 1973; and, as I remember, the critical community greeted Ballard's novel with a flurry of nervous dismay. But of course reviewers do not admit to nervous dismay. Nervous dismay is a response that never announces itself as such, and comes to the ball tricked out as Aesthetic Fastidiousness or Moral Outrage.

Crash provoked much fancy dress. Some reviewers reached for their thesauri and looked up "repellent"; cooler hands claimed to find the novel "boring." I'm not sure if anyone else adopted the guise I wore: sarcasm. Haughtily (and nervously), I sent Crash up. I was twenty-three. Later that year my first novel appeared, and, like Ballard, I stood accused of displaying a "morbid sexuality." In comparison, thought, my sexuality--and my novel--were obsequiously conventional.

Having said all that, I still choose Powell. With Dance he has given me dozens of characters who have quite simply become part of my mental universe. They are so richly imagined and sympathetically depicted that they inflect my everyday experience of the world; they're the sort of characters who, to the initiated, serve as topics of conversation, common reference points, aids to understanding new acquaintances, clarifying punch lines to real-life situations.

On top of that, Dance is consistently funny, its humor often grounded in the bewilderment created when those who care only for money or power are confronted with the world of art. Here, for example, Nick Jenkins fields a question from his friend and sometime nemesis Kenneth Widmerpool about his job:

"I was in publishing. Art books. Now it is the film business."

"Indeed? What unusual ways you choose to earn a living."

Or take this exchange, which finds Nick discussing books with the enthusiastic, if gruffly fuddled, octogenarian General Conyers:

"I've been reading something called Orlando," said the General. "Virginia Woolf. Ever heard of it?"

"I read it when it first came out."

"What do you think of it?"

"Rather hard to say in a word."

"You think so?"

"Yes."

Unsatisfied, the General presses Jenkins:

"Odd stuff, Orlando," said the General, who was not easily shifted from his subject. "Starts about a young man in the fifteen-hundreds. Then, about eighteen-thirty, he turns into a woman. You say you've read it?"

"Yes."

"Did you like it? Yes or no?"

"Not greatly."

"You didn't?"

"No."

"The woman can write, you know."

"Yes, I can see that. I still didn't like it."

The General thought again for some seconds.

"Well, I shall read a bit more of it," he said, at last. "Don't want to waste too much time on that sort of thing, of course. Now, psychoanalysis. Ever read anything about that? Sure you have. That was what I was on over Christmas."

Powell's characters--and the gentle irony of his tone--serve as a reminder that we're all strange in our own ways, and we apprehend one another poorly at best; a healthy response is to accept, and attempt to understand, as much of that odd individuality as we can. It's an approach to the world that I ultimately find far more congenial than Amis's more corrosive, biting, and often nasty perspective.

Powell, who didn't mind a literary feud, might enjoy being given the last word; perhaps the following excerpt from the fourth volume of his autobiography, The Strangers All Are Gone (1982) will serve as an acute reminder of the proper relation between himself and Martin Amis. Describing a visit to Kingsley and Hilly Amis early in Kingsley's career, Powell writes:

During the Swansea visit the three Amis children were in some skilful manner relegated so that the Uplands house was entirely free from them throughout our stay. Since Waugh was very keen on the doctrine that children should neither be seen or heard, Violet mentioned to him the adroitness of the Amises in having so resourcefully disposed of their family.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Martin should be neither seen nor heard, but perhaps he should cede his hold on the nineteenth position to his elder and better?

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.