PAPERBACKS
Independent on Sunday, The, Jan 21, 2007 by Tom Boncza-Tomaszewski
Mother's Milk
By Edward St Aubyn
PICADOR [pound]7.99
We first meet the relatively well-heeled Melrose family at the birth of
eldest son, Robert, (although readers may already be aware of them from St
Aubyn's other books featuring Patrick Melrose). Unusually, the episode is
described from Robert's point of view. The scene is eventually revealed as
Robert's memory, one of many he finds himself considering, "feeling his
infancy disintegrating", after the birth of his brother, Thomas; age five,
Robert is already as obsessed with his past as his troubled wreck of a father,
Patrick.
The story unfolds over the four painful summers following Thomas's
birth. For the first three, the family stay in France at Patrick's mother's
house, a place she's donated to a New Age foundation. Patrick fluctuates
between despair that he's lost his inheritance, profound loathing for his
mother and trying to deal with his lust for a former lover also staying with
them. His wife, Mary, hovers "like a dragonfly over the surface of
sleep" in case she misses the "slightest inflection of her baby's
distress"; and Robert daydreams of solitude while people try to make him
play with other children of his age ("Would his father," he
considers, "ask a woman to tea just because she was 42?").
This book spits caustic wit and bitter truths about all aspects of
parent-child relationships from every other page without once feeling
heartless. On the other hand, if you feel alcoholism, drug- addiction, infidelity,
post-natal depression and assisted suicide have no place in a novel about
family life, you'd best keep well away.
One Life
By Rebecca Frayn