St. Aubyn’s novels have an aristocratic atmosphere of tart horror, the hideousness of the material contained by a powerfully aphoristic, lucid prose style. In good and bad ways, his fiction offers a kind of deadly gossip, and feeds the reader’s curiosity like one of the mortal morsels offered up by Tacitus or Plutarch in their chatty histories ... Although reviewers liken Edward St. Aubyn to Evelyn Waugh and Oscar Wilde (hard not to, when his characters have neon names like David Windfall), he is a colder, more savage writer than either ... Perhaps because he is much more of an aristocratic insider than Wilde or Waugh...he retains no arriviste enamoredness of the upper classes he is supposedly satirizing. On the contrary, his fiction reads like a shriek of filial hatred; most of the posh English who people his novels are virulently repellent ... On every page of St. Aubyn’s work is a sentence or a paragraph that prompts a laugh, or a moment of enriched comprehension ... Patrick, with his cool wit, plays the adult role quite well; but he is really always the throbbing child, pulsing with pain. And in this way St. Aubyn’s novels seem to be not only books about trauma but traumatized books, condemned to return again and again to primal wounds. The striking gap between, on the one hand, the elegant polish of the narration, the silver rustle of these exquisite sentences, the poised narrowness of the social satire and, on the other hand, the screaming pain of the family violence inflicted on Patrick makes these books some of the strangest of contemporary novels.

US consumers have, I think, the nearly unfair and delightfully addictive pleasure of reading the quintet of a piece... which is how I read them, how I binged on them, to the neglect of my children, my marriage, and the novel I’m writing, as did most other readers I discussed them with ... For me the cycle reads like one giant novel, this magnificent bildungsroman so supremely post-post-modern in its brand of cutting-edge psychological realism combined with high class taxonomy, each as neatly presented via the formal challenges St. Aubyn sets himself book to book not only to keep the reader on her toes but also to subtract weight from their heavy subject matter (incestuous buggering, adultery, heroin addiction) ... I’m talking about something simpler and, by dint of near-perfect execution, more readable straight through than Ulysses. In the end, St. Aubyn’s novels are just so damn fun, so cuttingly comic, so wicked and quick. So perfectly short ... I couldn’t read anyone else after St. Aubyn for several weeks. Like life after rehab it all seemed so, well, dull.

The British author has let it be known that virtually everything that has happened to Patrick is based in autobiography. Yet instead of recording his experiences in tear-jerker memoirs, Mr. St. Aubyn has transmuted them into stunning, sparkling fiction ... Patrick is 'desperate to escape the self-subversion of irony and say what he really meant.; Yet Mr. St. Aubyn's feat is in exploiting the same ironical trap for the purposes of art. That sense of detachment—the state of simultaneously being yourself and viewing yourself as though from a distance—is the key to his ability to evoke the pitch and heave of trauma while describing it with devastating lucidity. Who knows how much payment in tears and blood it cost him to forge his style from the material of a harrowing life, but the Patrick Melrose novels justify the often denigrated (often with good reason) form of the autobiographical novel ... for readers who have followed Patrick through Mr. St. Aubyn's unforgettable novels, the story's conclusion is deeply affecting ... It is a beautiful and startlingly hopeful place to leave Patrick once and for all.

If Downton Abbey is not your cup of Pimms, then a post-1960 version with hard drugs and a harder sort of family drama — think Freud on a speedball — may not suit you, either ... St. Aubyn draws you in with some of the most perfect dialogue to be found in modern fiction, but even when the events he is describing utterly horrify, and that will be often, he reels off prose of such devastating beauty and seriousness that you can't look away ... If the titles of the Melrose cycle sound literal to you, you will probably hate these vicious, brilliant little books, but if you think that there is something to be gained from the literature of extremes, whether it's the searing perspective of a child, or a how-to on drugs, you might want to give St. Aubyn a try.

Can you always count on a bastard for a fancy prose style? It is hard to imagine the fiction of Edward St Aubyn stripped of the cool silver of its style. I am not accusing St Aubyn of being a bastard; I mean that he writes very well about bastards, and that both their contempt for the world and St Aubyn’s contempt for them find their best expression in a certain kind of intelligent, frozen stylishness. His upper-class snobs, perverts, tyrants, addicts and solipsists speak aphoristically, amusingly, cleverly, disdainfully; and the high polish of St Aubyn’s own prose is almost indistinguishable from theirs ... Each book is different in rhythm and tone. Never Mind, bloody with family suffering, has a claustral intensity (which Mother’s Milk returns to), while St Aubyn’s New York writing, in Bad News, is looser, jauntier, and registers the influence of Martin Amis’s Money ... What is best in Some Hope is what is always best in St Aubyn: the agony of the Melroses ... Mother’s Milk is better than anything St Aubyn has yet done. It wisely forgoes the larger social satire of the earlier books, and the Waugh-like bee-stings that accompany that aristocratic honeycomb, and focuses clingingly on the new Melrose family ... Every page carries spry, marvellously sprung sentences, and often the prose rises to a real power of ironic inversion and paradox...

...five short, remarkably compressed novels ...that follow their protagonist, Patrick Melrose, from childhood through troubled middle age. The books are both harrowing and...hilarious. St. Aubyn has a cut-glass prose style, a gift for unexpected metaphor, and a skewering eye ... Because he writes so knowingly about the British class system...St. Aubyn has frequently been compared to Evelyn Waugh. The difference is that Waugh yearned to be like the people he made fun of ... St. Aubyn, descended from a family that has been in England since the Norman Conquest, has none of that nose-pressed-against-the-glass wistfulness. His aristos are not cartoonish, like Waugh’s, but funny in their horrificness, like the people Dante encounters in the lower basements of hell ... [St Aubyn] writes about drug-taking like someone who knows what he’s talking about ... Patrick’s other problems—his lusts, his depressions, his temper, his feelings of failure and inadequacy, his suicidal thoughts—seem similarly authentic, and reading the Melrose novels, you sometimes sense that the writing of them may have been a kind of catharsis ... There is about this fifth book, which ends on a partly optimistic note, a feeling not just of finality but of relief, of a story over with at long last.

Parental death, heroin, childhood rape, emotional frigidity, suicide, alcoholism — the five Patrick Melrose novels have it all. In her introduction to this collection of Edward St Aubyn’s works, Zadie Smith tries to sell these books — tragic but also full of pitch-black humour — as holiday reads ... St Aubyn writes with breathtaking clarity ... 'Stop me when it sounds summery,' writes Smith. They aren’t your typical beach books, but if you are after total immersion, you couldn’t do better.

Edward St. Aubyn, born in 1960, is the most fascinating of contemporary literary investigators into the phenomenon and experience of class ... St. Aubyn’s prose reaches a crescendo of note-perfect viciousness when he writes about the members of the braying classes ... The novels, however, are not some innocuous version of Louis Quatorze’s court; rather, they are a ruthless dissection of a particularly English kind of behavior ... It is a loathsome world, where amorality is a trifling price to avoid being taken as a bore or a prig. The style with which St. Aubyn skewers this world draws on a coruscating repertoire. There is Wildean wit ... It is a style at once saturated with controlled hatred and anger and soaring in its beauty—prose endowed with the meticulousness of a surgeon’s steel ... Good satire on the privileged classes has been done before. What distinguishes St. Aubyn’s anatomy of this class is that he uses the class novel to enact its own literary redemption rather than settling for satire alone ... 'Beauty plus pity—that is the closest we can get to a definition of art,' Nabokov wrote of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. That seems an apt description of the Patrick Melrose quartet ... Quite apart from the brilliance of its prose style, the quartet will come to be seen as a seminal work in English fiction for having fashioned an ethical style, pressed into the service of an emotional and moral truthfulness, using yet transcending its vertiginous displays of mere cleverness or self-regarding irony.

...this omnibus edition shows that St. Aubyn’s five Patrick Melrose novels may well constitute one of the most ambitious novel cycles since Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. ... This cycle is no ordinary family saga, or even that of an extraordinary family (which the Melrose clan certainly is); plot summaries don’t touch on St. Aubyn’s gift. Though the author has clearly mined his own experience, he has refined it into something exquisite, an exploration of consciousness and the journey from the helplessness of childhood to 'the pure inevitability of things being as they were,' as elegant a definition of acceptance as anyone is likely to write. And his serious purpose is buoyed by an abundant wit, laugh-out-loud funniness, and piercing observations into the world of privilege and entitlement.