Bad News picks up on the story of Patrick Melrose where Patrick, age twenty-two, receives news of his father's death. “Perhaps he would need all his courage not to dance in the street, not to smile too broadly.” The reason for Patrick's elation goes back to his childhood as described in detail in Never Mind, the first novel in the British author's autobiographical series, where, as a child, his sadistic father subjected Patrick to unending emotion abuse, physical abuse and (gasp! gulp! gasp again!) sexual abuse.
Patrick is obliged to travel to New York to claim his father's ashes. Once on the Concorde, emotionally distraught and drug-starved, Patrick encounters the ultimate British nightmare: a bigmouth American, former Army pilot in Vietnam, a wheeler dealer off the pages of Melville's The Confidence-Man who calls him Paddy and expects Patrick to be his good buddy and listen enthusiastically as he, Earl Hammer, hammers him with a constant stream of his own degraded personal shit. Well, at least he's on the Concorde; he's so grateful. Patrick thinks the airline should advertise: “It's because we care, not just for your physical comfort, but for your mental health, that we shorten your conversations with people like Earl Hammer.”
New York is the perfect setting for this Edward St. Aubyn novel. Similar to Anthony Burgess' British poet Enderby in Clockwork Testament, the contrast between a highly educated, literary Brit and a gaggle of Americans makes for stinging satire that's fueled by Patrick's need of these men and women to fulfill his unquenchable hankering for drugs and sex. Patrick's emotional, drug-induced floundering and bellyflops bring to mind the wise words of philosopher Epicurus, "Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little".
Ah, biting British satire. Critics and reviewers frequently liken St. Aubyn to Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene but I see his literary antecedents reaching back to Anthony Trollope. Here's a quick character sketch where Patrick takes the elevator to his room in a swank hotel on the Upper East Side:
“Patrick caught sight of himself in a large gilt mirror, and noticed that, as usual, he looked rather overdressed and extremely ill. There was a disturbing contrast between the care with which the clothes had been assembled and the ease with which the face looked as if it might fall apart. His very long black overcoat, dark blue suit, and thin black and silver tie (bought by his father in the early sixties) seemed to be unrelated to the chaotic tangle of brown hair which surrounded his dead-white and shiny face. The face itself was in a spasm of contradiction. The full lips were pinched inward, the eyes reduced to narrow slits, the nose, which was permanently blocked, forced him to breathe through his open mouth and made him look rather imbecilic; and a frown concentrated his forehead into a vertical crease directly above the nose.”
If you read Trollope's character sketches of the likes of Obadiah Slope and Bertie Stanhope in Barchester Towers, you'll see striking similarities. Actually, I think there's more than a small measure of Bertie Stanhope's character in Patrick Melrose.
Bad News is a howler. I laughed heartily several times on every single page. And so, so well written. A quartet of memorable scenes:
Patrick takes a taxi to Tompkins Square in Alphabet City to score some smack on the street. Fortunately, his longtime pal Chilly Willy saves him in the nick of time: otherwise, Patrick would have scored a knife in the gut. Hey, Patrick! Parading around as a rich dude buying drugs at night down in the East Village amounts to nothing less than a death wish.
Back in his hotel room, after shooting up with heroin, Patrick's mind becomes a vaudeville stage for a long lineup for such as The President, Nanny, Honest John, The Vicar, Attila the Hun. A snip of the drama: "Attila the Hun (basso profundo): 'Die, Christian dog! (Decapitates the Vicar.) Vicar's Severed Head (pausing thoughtfully): 'You know, the other day, my young granddaughter came to me and said, 'Grandfather, I like Christianity.'" Much of the juicier action of the novel takes place in Patrick's head and Chapter 7 counts as exhibit A.
At dinner, in the company of older men, his mind completely fried by drugs, we read: “He sat astonished in front of the menu, as if he had never seen one before. There were pages of dead things – cows, shrimps, pigs, oysters, lambs – stretched out like a casualty list, accompanied in a brief description of how they had been treated since they died – skewered, grilled, smoked, and boiled. Christ, if they thought he was going to eat these things they must be mad.”
Patrick picks up Rachel at a nightclub. They go to a diner where Rachel gorges herself on chili and a banana split.
“'I feel kinda nau-tious,' complained Rachel, as they went up in the hotel elevator.
'I'm not surprised,' said Patrick severely, 'I feel nauseous and I was only watching.'
'Hey, you're pretty hos-tel.'”
Ha! Many readers label Patrick a snob. But considering all the grotesqueries he witnesses in New York, many of his responses are amazingly appropriate. Case in point: Rachel made me nauseous – and I only read about her stuffing herself like a farmer's prize pig.
Count me as a new Edward St. Aubyn fan. I'm on to Dunbar and plan to return to the other Patrick Melrose novels. Tally-ho!
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