London Review Of Books
(www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n21/print/wood02_.html)
Bastards
James Wood
MotherÕs Milk
by Edward St Aubyn á Picador, 279 pp, £12.99
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 AubynÕs 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 AubynÕs own prose is almost indistinguishable from
theirs. Evelyn Waugh is often invoked by reviewers of St Aubyn, but Jane Austen
and Henry James might be equal influences, the Austen and James whose
drawing-room performers are in some ways inseparable, stylistically at least,
from the authorsÕ own performances.