The object of satire here is book awards: most notably, the well-known Man Booker Prize, depicted in barely disguised terms as the Elysian Prize...Both the judges on the panel for the Elysian Prize and the hopeful authors of submitted books are sent up here with a light, wicked hand reminiscent at once of Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark … Mr. St. Aubyn has a lot of fun giving us samples from these novels that underscore his gift for mimicry and parody, while at the same time charting the political alliances and alliances of convenience that develop among the judges as they jockey for position and influence, extracting — and trading — promises of support as if they were Iowa caucus voters, not judges of literary merit ... It’s simply an entertaining cartwheel of a book with a glittering razor’s edge.
Lost for Words is another comedy, a send-up of literary prizegiving in general and of the Man Booker Prize in particular … What makes the book interesting is not so much its obvious message as its verbal dexterity: its mimicry, its stylishness, and an almost hectic inventiveness that has the sneaky effect of casting doubt on the whole novel-writing enterprise. Far from being at a loss for words, most of the book teems with cleverness, with a sense that words can be made to do almost anything—and a suspicion that that may be tantamount to nothing … St. Aubyn himself is a conjurer, able to take that greasy deck of cards and make it perform tricks of a sort rarely seen anymore.
St. Aubyn’s latest, Lost for Words, is a book mainly about the flight from pain through reading and writing. It is also a sporadically jaunty, often hilarious farce about a literary prize … The novel’s other characters offer many laughs, but aren’t drawn with nearly the same empathy and sharpness as Sam, Katherine, Alan, and Vanessa. The book is like a letter written half with a calligraphy pen and half with a purple magic marker. Both parts, in their own ways, are very good. Some of the latter scenes are very, very funny … St. Aubyn’s attempt to weave the theme of pain and avoidance through his more satirical portraits doesn’t quite work. He rations his sympathy and skewering too unevenly among the characters.
This deliciously irreverent novel, Edward St. Aubyn’s eighth, will delight his admirers on this side of the Atlantic … Lost for Words is a withering satire of the vicious, back-stabbing process out of which literary prize winners emerge, most particularly the process by which Britain’s Man Booker Prizes are chosen … As the jurors lumber and squabble their way first to the Long List of nominees, then to the Short List, then at last to the ultimate victor, St. Aubyn has a splendid time satirizing just about every kind of fiction being written in English these days, from the pseudo-streetwise wot u starin at to the fey All the World’s a Stage.
There is enough here, you might think, for any comic novel — but though the book ends climactically with the award ceremony in the Fishmongers’ Hall, much of it is taken up with a contrary narrative … The chapters about Katherine and her three current lovers have very little to do with the prize, but they are the most psychologically urgent of the novel. In them, St. Aubyn’s discursive prose ranges over the subjects of depression, promiscuity, nervous collapse and unrequited love with an ease and insight that are thrilling … Everything St. Aubyn writes is worth reading for the cleansing rancor of his intelligence and the fierce elegance of his prose — but rollicking, he is not. A knockabout comic novel needs a plot that believes in its own twists and turns, and that is not on offer here.
The theme of St. Aubyn’s latest novel is the way in which, in our time, and in part at least through the literary prize system, opportunists, charlatans, and fools have been allowed to set themselves up as arbiters of literature … The result is that we have an uneasy sense throughout of free-floating dislocation; this or that portent falls at our feet with a thud, while passages of what is surely intended to be high comedy leave us dully frowning: when it comes to comedy, nothing is more dispiriting than an in-joke that one is not in on … Lost for Words, although uneven, is an entertaining squib, and it is obvious that St. Aubyn had a wonderful time writing it. The caricatures are painted with a broad brush, and the jokes too are broad, or the ones we can get are, anyway.
From such an accomplished author, Lost for Words is a slight novel. Its tone wobbles, and some of the humour falls flat. Its broad comic timbre—just shy of farce—sacrifices any genuine emotional investment in the cast. Thus attempts at characterisation and subplots that have little to do with the novel’s central target leave the reader impatient to get to the good bits. But there are many good bits and, on occasion, inspired ones … To the extent that St Aubyn advances an argument, it seems to be voiced by a guest at the Elysian Prize dinner: ‘If an artist is good, nobody else can do what he or she does and therefore all comparisons are incoherent. Only the mediocre, pushing forward a commonplace view of life in a commonplace language, can really be compared.’
Lost for Words is much lighter than the Melrose novels – a brisk, ultimately farcical satire that is ideal for the sun lounger and unlikely to earn the author further heavyweight comparisons. Whereas previously St Aubyn’s subject has been the tortured intricacy of family life, he now turns to the snaky politics of the literary world. Everything he writes is a comedy of manners, and even here one can occasionally see the legacy of Henry James and Jane Austen … We are left in little doubt that St. Aubyn has contempt for the political agendas and horse-trading that influence the process of awarding literary prizes. More interesting than this is his concern with the hyperactive self-consciousness that informs the very act of creating fiction – and especially the kind of fiction that’s intended to be prize-worthy.
This is the nastiest sort of satire, one close enough to real-world people and things to singe. Its silly plot, which at times seems almost like an afterthought, makes Lost for Words less a novel than a jeremiad and savage field report … Among the novel’s greatest assets is its anthropological bent. St. Aubyn’s characters each embody a broad — at times, too broad — literary type. There’s the Oxford don, whose quest to reward real literature is thwarted at every turn by ego and ignorance; a wealthy self-published writer with a frighteningly overinflated sense of talent; a mystery writer who hates reading anything unpleasant or hard … Amid the chuckles, sad truths about critical favor emerge. Elysian Prize winners conform to their judges’ Orientalist sensibilities, align with their misguided notions of authenticity, or flatter their cursory knowledge of literary history.
What we're left with is an absurdist, satirical lark. In the earlier books, Melrose could act cartoonishly, but he was never a cartoon. In Lost for Words, ‘character’ is really ‘caricature.’ There's a French intellectual who talks about ‘a shift in the signifier of the desert of the Real,’ an editor who sleeps with his sexy young writer, a Beckettian novelist who longs ‘to release his writing from the wretched positivity of affirming anything at all’ … The light plot — a panel sifting through a bunch of submissions — enables St. Aubyn to train his satirical eye on two primary targets. First, there are the judges. Though we pretend that literary awards are doled out solely based on merit, we know that this isn't so, and Lost for Words shows just how much this isn't so...The second source of satire: the submissions themselves.
Lost for Words, a series of madcap set pieces, concerns a major British literary award, the Elysian, whose zone of eligibility is ‘confined to the Imperial ash heap of the Commonwealth,’ as one character puts it. Any likeness to the Man Booker Prize is in no way coincidental … For all his savage wit, St. Aubyn also wants to explore the redemptive qualities of whatever lies beyond it — and beyond social status, beyond wordplay, beyond awards … This book is like the first glass of water you drink on a hungover morning: light fare but, given what's come before it, entirely refreshing.
The plot pivots around the promiscuity of a nubile novelist who has ‘averaged twenty lovers a year since she was sixteen’ and who is in the process of juggling three or more through most of the narrative. Both the author and the reader have great fun with this ...Through preposterous plot machinations, a cookbook of traditional Indian recipes is mistakenly submitted as fiction and becomes an unlikely contender, ‘operating as the boldest metafictional performance of our time.’ The madcap climax involves an assassination plot and a stuck elevator at the awards banquet before surprisingly resolving itself with a (tentative) happy ending.
This comedic novel chronicles a year in the life of the Elysium Prize, a fictional Booker-like British literary award. The Elysium is mired in scandal and incompetence from the get-go: the underwriting funds come from a dubious agribusiness conglomerate, the judging panel is marginally qualified, and the process of selecting a shortlist is more about alliances and favors than quality … St. Aubyn is clearly having fun with this material, and the book is breezy and propulsive. Still, the satire isn’t particularly deep, and none of the many characters in this short novel are featured long enough to make a lasting impression.
