Arts: Literature of the 0.1 Percent

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Books Literature of the 0.1 Percent At Last, the latest of Edward St. Aubyn's masterful novels of privilege and the ways it warps its victims. By Jessica Winter Posted Thursday, Jan 26, 2012, at 08:45 PM ET " 'Privilege' is a judgment," Joan Didion writes in Blue Nights about her late daughter, Quintana, who grew up wealthy and well-connected and who died at age 39 after a long siege of physical and psychological ailments. " 'Privilege' is an accusation," Didion adds. Privilege is "an area to which—when I think of what she endured, when I consider what came later—I will not easily cop." Edward St. Aubyn will cop to it. A child of extreme privilege and equally extreme suffering and dysfunction, the English writer has spent five autobiographical novels slinging judgment and accusation at his own rarefied social class. St. Aubyn's brilliant bildungsroman is literature of the 0.1 percent, and one of its signal achievements is to convince the rest of us that a trust fund and an entry in Burke's Peerage are vectors of inheritable—and possibly incurable—disease. By now, readers have glimpsed the ghastly childhood of St. Aubyn's alter ego, Patrick Melrose (in Never Mind, 1992); the drug-deranged wreckage of Patrick's early twenties (Bad News, 1992); his rueful steps toward the exotic climes of sobriety and gainful vocation (Some Hope, 1994); and his midlife passage into ambivalent, alcoholic fatherhood (2005's Mother's Milk, shortlisted for the Booker Prize). These first four books have been collected in one volume as The Patrick Melrose Novels, arriving in the United States alongside the fifth and possibly valedictory entry, At Last (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), which finds Patrick broke, divorced, recently suicidal, once ... To continue reading, click here. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate What the Supreme Court Can Learn From Gabby Giffords and Jeff Flake's Tender Moment What's Wunderkind Blogger Ezra Klein Doing in the New Robert Harris Thriller? Guess Who's Winning Big as Iran's Economy Collapses Under Sanctions	Advertisement
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