The Patrick Melrose novels
The five Patrick Melrose novels are intense, brutal, and beautiful, witty and acerbically well-observed. If you’re here, you probably know this already. If not, I will tell you by way of explanation that Edward St. Aubyn’s series, published between 1992 and 2011, is a deft mash-up of the English social novel and what I suppose is best described as the recovery memoir, something like Evelyn Waugh by way of William S. Burroughs, but with a rather lighter touch than either. It traces the life of the eponymous Patrick Melrose, an extraordinarily damaged, angry, self-destructive, high-born English snob, who also has the distinction of probably being both the most eloquent and the most finely heeled junkie in popular culture. In the first novel, he is five. In the final novel, he is 45, and burying his mother.
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