From Publishers Weekly Review
(www.amazon.com/Mothers-Milk-Edward-St-Aubyn/dp/1890447404)
Starred Review.
This elegant and witty satire on the dissatisfactions
of family life, which continues the story of Patrick Melrose, the
hero of St. Aubyn's U.S. debut (Some Hope), opens in August 2000 at
Patrick's mother's home in the south of France, with Patrick's five-year-old
son, Robert, remembering with preternatural clarity the circumstances of his
birth. No one on this vacation is particularly happy; Robert realizes he's
being displaced by the arrival of baby brother Thomas, and Patrick is furious
because his mother plans to leave her house (and what remains of her fortune)
to Seamus Dourke, a ridiculous New Age guru. Over the next three Augusts, the
Melrose story unfolds from different points of view: Patrick is deep in the
throes of a midlife crisis; Mary, his wife, feels her self has been obliterated
by the incessant demands of motherhood; and the two precociously verbal
children struggle to make sense of the complexities of life. The narrative
itself is thin, but the pleasures of the book reside in the author's droll
observations (overweight Americans, for example, have "become their own
air-bag systems in a dangerous world"). It's yet another novel about familial
dysfunction but told in a fresh, acerbic way.
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