At Last
The Final Patrick Melrose Novel
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4.3 • 7 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Now a 5-Part Limited Event Series on Showtime, Starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Blythe Danner
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year • One of TIME's Top 10 Fiction Books of the Year • Named One of the best books of the Year by The Telegraph and Esquire
Here, from the writer described by The Guardian as "our purest living prose stylist" and whom Alan Hollinghurst has called "the most brilliant English novelist of his generation," is a work of glittering social comedy, profound emotional truth, and acute verbal wit. At Last is also the stunning culmination of one of the great fiction enterprises of the past two decades in the life of the English novel.
As readers of Edward St. Aubyn's extraordinary earlier works—Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and the Man Booker Prize finalist Mother's Milk—are well aware, for Patrick Melrose, "family" has always been a double-edged sword. At Last begins as friends, relatives, and foes trickle in to pay final respects to his mother, Eleanor. An American heiress, Eleanor married into the British aristocracy, giving up the grandeur of her upbringing for "good works" freely bestowed on everyone but her own son, who finds himself questioning whether his transition to a life without parents will indeed be the liberation he had so long imagined.
The service ends, and family and friends gather for a final party. Amid the social niceties and social horrors, Patrick begins to sense the prospect of release from the extremes of his childhood, and at the end of the day, alone in his room, the promise some form of safety...at last.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Eleanor Melrose has died, and her son Patrick is attending her memorial service at the opening of this brilliant, introspective, and witty novel from St. Aubyn, the fifth, and presumably final, in the autobiographical series (after Mother's Milk which, like this novel, was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize). Though it's possible to read At Last on its own, it's best appreciated as the conclusion to the long, often torturous story of Patrick Melrose and his aristocratic but barbarous family. The funeral allows St. Aubyn to bring an enormous cast into play, offering multiple perspectives on the Melroses, but St. Aubyn's true subject is Patrick: being raped by his father as a child, his mother's squandering of the family fortune on the "Transpersonal Foundation," his own stints in rehab. Despite a level of dysfunction that would render most novels unreadable (and most lives unlivable), the book is a masterpiece of dark comedy, with plentiful wit. St. Aubyn's greatest accomplishment, however, lies in his rendering of consciousness itself, turning inchoate thought and memory into a thematically unified, unflinching, and deeply satisfying narrative. Though he echoes Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, St. Aubyn's voice is unique, powerful, and scathingly funny.
