Reviews
St. Aubyn's technique is to crystallise emotional intensity into sentences of arctic beauty, which can be caustically witty or brutal. His novels are uncommonly well controlled, and thus their impact is all the more powerful... In At Last this crystallisation and control are on glittering display...We have reached the pinnacle of a series that has plunged into darkness and risen towards light. At Last is both resounding end and hopeful beginning., The Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn are a masterwork for the 21st century. Written by one of our greatest English prose stylists, they present a cornucopia of humor, pathos, razor sharp judgment, pain, joy, and everything in between., St. Aubyn's skill with characterization, his dissection of how a personality warps, settles, or improves over time, is nowhere more evident than in his aging of Patrick, whose mood and mental state are a gauge for the tone of each novel. . . At Last is far less dramatic than any previous Melrose book, although the humor and perfectly observed dialogue remain. Its calm is entirely suited to the wisdom Patrick Melrose has painfully, finally earned., "On every page of St. Aubyn's work is a sentence or a paragraph that prompts a laugh, or a moment of enriched comprehension_ .Implausibly brilliant speech_ Many of the scenes have a delicious, oysterish kind of edible comedy-they read smoothly and go down very easily, like something out of Anthony Powell."-James Wood, The New Yorker "When I read St. Aubyn I'm floored over and over again by the warmth and intelligence and eloquence of his work_ Gorgeous, golden prose."-Lev Grossman, Time "Beautifully wrought_ Brutally funny and sad."- Vanity Fair, "When I read St. Aubyn I'm floored over and over again by the warmth and intelligence and eloquence of his work….Gorgeous, golden prose."---Lev Grossman, Time "Remarkable…Written with an utterly idiosyncratic combination of emotional precision, crystalline observation, and black humor…Affecting, alarming, and, yes, amusing, all at the same time."---Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Sparkling…Nothing about the plots can prepare you for the rich, acerbic comedy of St. Aubyn's world."---Zadie Smith, Harper's Magazine "On every page of St. Aubyn's work is a sentence or a paragraph that prompts a laugh, or a moment of enriched comprehension."---James Wood, The New Yorker "Like Waugh, St. Aubyn writes with exquisite control and a brilliant comic touch.…A fitting conclusion to one of the best fictional cycles in contemporary fiction."--- The Boston Globe "Beautifully wrought...Brutally funny and sad."--- Vanity Fair "The Melrose novels are among the smartest and most beautiful fictional achievements of the past twenty years." ---The New York Observer, St. Aubyn writes with exquisite control and a brilliant comic touch. . . An intelligent and surprisingly hopeful novel, a fitting conclusion to one of the best fictional cycles in contemporary fiction., Remarkable . . . In order to understand what makes these novels so exceptional, it's better to open any one of them at random, marveling at the precise observations and glistening turns of phrase, not to mention dialogue witty enough to make our own most clever conversations sound like . . . well, like St. Aubyn's Princess Margaret., One of the most amazing reading experiences I've had in a decade. After all the suffering and torment and despair that Patrick Melrose has been through over the years, [St. Aubyn] leaves him in a very interesting place, and he does it all with his incredible examination of the sweep of time and the way our understanding of people changes over decades. All of that is done with this incredible, biting, witty, hilarious prose style, the elegant, classic English sentences that he writes and these amazing put-downs, and he's great at dissecting an entire social world with a really wicked scalpel., Ferociously funny, painfully acute and exhilaratingly written. . . Brimming with witty flair, sardonic perceptiveness and literary finesse., Sparkling . . . With the wit of Wilde, the lightness of Wodehouse, and the waspishness of Waugh, [St. Aubyn] wraps his fancy prose style around the self in extremis ("suffocated, dropped, born of raped as well as born to be raped"), situations more familiar to readers of Cooper or Burroughs., With lacerating humor and razor sharp imagery, St. Aubyn continues to work out his themes: the follies of the British upper class, the 'psychological impact of inherited wealth,' the complex dynamics between parent and child., On every page of St. Aubyn's work is a sentence or a paragraph that prompts a laugh, or a moment of enriched comprehension., You have to drill down pretty far and pretty mercilessly to get to the vulnerable, human soul of someone like Patrick. But St. Aubyn does, and he mines extraordinary amounts of humor and pathos out of Patrick's thin, bedraggled life. . . St. Aubyn's prose recalls Virginia Woolf's; it has the same combination of lyricism and precision., The thing that everyone loves about this man . . . is that his prose has an easy charm that masks a ferocious, searching intellect. As a sketcher of character, his wit -- whether turned against pointless members of the aristocracy or hopeless crack dealers -- is ticklingly wicked. As an analyser of broken minds and tired hearts he is as energetic, careful and creative as the perfect shrink. And when it comes to spinning a good yarn, whether over the grand scale of three volumes or within a single page of anecdote, he has a natural talent for keeping you on the edge of your seat . . . [An] amazing book., Piercing. . . Mr. St. Aubyn shares Patrick's gift for observation, and his radar for pictorial and emotional detail enables him to capture just about anything in his pointillist prose., It's tough competition for the most-underrated writer in the English language--there's plenty of neglect to go around -- but if you put a Colt Commander to my head (see below) I might well say it's St. Aubyn, the chronically under-published chronicler of abuse, dysfunction, alcoholism and worse in the English upper classes. At Last is the final novel, one thinks, in his series about his alter ego, the neurotic Patrick Melrose. It's pretty much a lock to be one of the funniest, saddest, most beautiful books of the year., "On every page of St. Aubyn's work is a sentence or a paragraph that prompts a laugh, or a moment of enriched comprehension... .Implausibly brilliant speech... Many of the scenes have a delicious, oysterish kind of edible comedy-they read smoothly and go down very easily, like something out of Anthony Powell."-James Wood, The New Yorker "When I read St. Aubyn I'm floored over and over again by the warmth and intelligence and eloquence of his work... Gorgeous, golden prose."-Lev Grossman, Time "Beautifully wrought... Brutally funny and sad."- Vanity Fair
