Enthusiasms

Bad News

I read Bad News by Edward St Aubyn, all night long, unable to sleep, waiting for it to be early enough in the morning that I could take my daily dose of clonazepam but late enough that its effects would endure until the next dose, and unable to sleep. That is perhaps the best possible state to read this raw, acerbic, and above all precise novel. I read one review of it that contained this line: “I found myself wondering about that age old question of what it’d be like to take some drugs. Not in this way, of course – and, wait, what am I saying, not at all!” What a sheltered world he must live in. Can you review this book without having done drugs? Of course, with the outsider’s view of grotesque curiosity, and the impossible attempt at empathy with experience for which one has no point of reference. Can you review this book having done drugs? Of course, with the insider’s view, which can blind you to the literary qualities of the work, because the book doesn’t have to do as much heavy lifting to evoke the joys and horrors of drug abuse if the reader has already felt it intimately.

This is the second book in a series of five largely autobiographical books, which starts with Never Mind, published in 1992, and ends with At Last, published in 2012. It charts Aubyn’s alter ego Patrick Melrose from the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father in early childhood, through the self-abuse he subjected himself to in early adulthood, to some kind of attempt at a resolution in middle age, I think. I haven’t read the other books and probably won’t, for some time. This is the book that speaks to me. It’s 1982, Patrick is 22, just a little bit younger than I am now, and on his way to New York to pick up his father’s remains. Unlike me, he has an enormous family fortune to squander, and manages to spend ten thousand dollars on a drug-fueled ramble through NYC in about forty-eight hours.

This book manages the rare feat which I strive for and seem to always miss in my own writing: to be raw and clinically precise at the same time. There are ugly, brutal depictions of junkies juxtaposed with ugly, satirical depictions of the excesses and hypocrisy of the British upper class, such as a sequence in which Patrick meets some of his father’s friends and associates for lunch—he will later retreat to the bathroom to throw up, have a fix, pass out for an hour and run away from the whole party. In this sequence, one particularly caricatured, middle-aged upper class man proceeds as follows: one of the other men, who recognizes his vanity, amiably offers, “Ballantine is one of the best shots in the world.” Ballantine protests, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, used to be the best shot in the world.” Already in this sentence he betrays the falsehood of his modesty: he has modified the statement, even as he declares that it is now past tense, from “one of the best” to “the best shot in the world.” But never mind, what he hasn’t lost is the greatest gun collection in the world. He gets a servent to fetch a book about his own gun collection, which boasts, on the cover, “the most valuable firearms in the world,” where only replacing the triggers costs over a million dollars. He follows up with another book: this one documenting his safari in Africa, where he used the greatest gun collection in the world to hunt:

‘This is a photo of me with a Tanganyikan mountain goat,’ said Ballantine, handing Patrick the second book. ‘I was told that it was the last potent male of the species, so I can’t help having mixed feelings about it.’ God, he’s sensitive, too, thought Patrick, looking at the photograph of a younger Ballantine, in a khaki hat, kneeling besides the corpse of a goat.

The man’s vanity has no limits, but the satirical caricature fits right into a book which happens as much in reality as in a state of pseudo-reality, of hanging fast to a lamp-post as strong winds of past pains and current drugs coursing through veins try to rip Patrick completely out of reality and into psychosis, a point at which he arrives at the mid-point of the novel, as a cacophony of inner voices keep him deliriously awake all night, arguing, commenting, defending themselves and accusing each other, sometimes to bluntly sad effect, sometimes to satirical hilarity, such as when The Fat Man, a man Patrick has glimpsed at a restaurant earlier in the day, invades his psychotic mind and stands on trial before a set of judges, defending his fatness as a way of life. The section with Ballantine, the arch snob, concludes:

Ballantine closed the two books and rested them on his knees. The loop of his monstrous vanity was complete. He had been talking about a book in which he wrote about his photographs of the animals he had shot with the guns from his own magnificent collection, a collection photographed (alas, not by him) in the second book.

But Bad News isn’t really about skewering the upper class to which Patrick (regrettably, yet at the same time embracingly) belongs. That isn’t what speaks to me in the book, because frankly I couldn’t give two shits about what those ultra-rich snobs are doing right now—they’re always up to no good in ways that would be hilarious if they weren’t so seriously fucked up. This book is about a bitter young man and the two most important, all-consuming relationships in his life. The prose is clear and littered with precise little sentences that, amidst the satire and general dreariness, strike you like a hammer and get at the real core of the issue. Here is the core of the book summed up in one paragraph:

The way other people felt about love, he felt about heroin, and he felt about love the way other people felt about heroin: that it was a dangerous and incomprehensible waste of time. What could he say to Debbie? ‘Although you know that my hatred for my father, and my love for drugs, are the most important relationships in my life, I want you to know that you come in third.’ What woman would not be proud to be ‘among the medals’ in such a contest?

And later, a biting comment: “He could even imagine loving a woman if he had lost her first.” Patrick has two major issues in his life that overshadow everything else: he can’t let go of his past, and when he turned to drugs, he came to love them so deeply that he can’t let go of them either. Patrick is a disgusting human being, able to spot the hypocrisies of others and constantly seeing them in himself, yet unable to stop himself from carrying them out nonetheless: people, to him, are not real, they are “Other People.” Yet he is also relatable, as you can see what has brought him to this point, and at times, if you recognize in yourself Patrick’s traits, you waver towards the horrifying conclusion that you might be a disgusting human being too.

His infidelity is serial, both against his girlfriends and to himself and his constant promises to give up drugs, and never to give up drugs again. This is illustrated in a late scene in the novel. Patrick has, through a series of phone calls, scheduled his homecoming: first, he will meet up with his friend Johnny to do drugs; then, pushing his “arrival time” forwards a few hours, he will meet his girlfriend Debbie; and then after that, he’ll meet another girl. Despite this, despite only being forty-eight hours away from England, his friends and girlfriend, he needs a hole to fuck: “Above all, he needed the oblivious moment of penetration when, for a second, he could stop thinking about himself. Unless, as too often happened, the appearance of intimacy unleashed a further disembodiment and a deeper privacy. Never mind that.”

After being spurned by Marianne, the daughter of a family friend and also friend to his ostensible girlfriend Debbie, Patrick goes to a club and eventually finds a girl to drag along to his hotel. As we briefly switch to her perspective—a narrative trick used sparingly, but effectively in this novel—we learn that she wants to start an art gallery and thinks maybe she can exploit this “eccentric Englishman” for money; Patrick, clearly, wants to exploit her for sex. Finally they reach his hotel room, and while the girl, Rachel, is in the bathroom, vomiting out the huge meal she has just gorged herself on—Patrick reflecting, while she eats, that drug abuse at least has a certain illusory romanticism to it, but no such thing exists for eating disorders, which are, of course, more vulgar addictions—Patrick’s mind again becomes fixated on his next fix:

Patrick was surprised to see Rachel standing miserably at the end of his bed. She faded quickly from his memory while she threw up in the bathroom, losing her individuality and becoming Other People, someone who might interrupt his fix, or his contemplation of the rush.

Patrick is an embittered, upper-class drug addict with obsessions with his past, which he can’t let go, even after the object of his hate, his father, is dead, and issues in the present, with drugs. This is the point at which the relationship between Patrick and Edward, the character and author, which has been explored to tedium, pops up, but more importantly the relationship between Patrick the character and the reader gains significance. Bad News is an ugly portrait of drug addiction, as Patrick is constantly juggling intravenous injections of heroin and cocaine, “black beauties” (amphetamine capsules), quaaludes—methaqualone, the mythical downer which circulated widely in 1982 NY, where the story is set, and gained infamy with the book and film The Wolf of Wall Street, but is rarely seen anymore—and alcohol.

I’ve read Junky by William Burroughs, which is also a stark portrait of rock-bottom addiction, but St Aubyn’s prose shines brighter. While Burroughs portrays addiction among the poor and homeless, Patrick is extremely well off economically, and yet the depictions of missed veins, the horrors of possibly injecting a deadly blood clot, the near-death knife’s-edge dance between the rush of injection and deadly overdose, feels more vital and just as raw in Bad News as in Junky. While Patrick has more money than he could ever need, he is as desperate when his connects fall through as Burroughs’s penniless comrades. Money does not equal happiness, and Patrick’s addiction is, if possible, even uglier than that portrayed in Junky, precisely because, since he doesn’t have to scramble for money just to get one more fix, he can go even further, take even more, really run himself into the ground on an endless supply. I wrote earlier that it feels absurdly privileged to think of oneself as having reached some sort of (watch out, cliché) “rock bottom” while having a caring mother preparing dinner and a warm bed and roof over one’s head, but Patrick is deeper in the hole than I’ve ever been, and also has more money than I’ll make in a lifetime.

Hunter S. Thompson, the first name that pops up when one thinks of literature about excessive drug binges, is more like a tourist guide. His is more of an idealized version of the binge that most people, like the reviewer I quoted at the beginning, will never have the courage or stupidity (yes, they are not antonyms) to embark upon. As fine a writer as HST is, the great Dr Gonzo has nothing on either Burroughs or St Aubyn, who is a fine prose stylist. The book is littered with fancy similes, a few of which seem overwrought, but most of which are spot on. Yet it is also a very self-reflexive work. At one point, Patrick thinks:

Sir Sampson Legend was the only honest suitor who ever sang the praises of a woman. ‘Give me your hand, Odd, let me kiss it; ‘tis as warm and soft — as what? Odd, as t’other hand.’ Now there was an accurate simile.

As for myself, it is impossible for me to write about this book without to some degree identifying with Patrick. Patrick is richer than me, and much deeper into drug addiction than me; yet we both share the impossible task of letting go of a difficult past. There is no need to compare one painful past with another in a crying contest; the important part is that it is all far into the past, and yet neither of us can let it go. Patrick’s two most important relationships in life are his hatred of his father, even as his father sits in a box of ashes, and his relationship with drugs. Other people become just that: Other People, obstacles that distract us from either our obsession with events and burning hatred for people from our past—or from drugs. They become inhuman. We collapse into solipsism. This morning, things unraveled for me again. Unlike Patrick, I do not have the cushion of an enormous heritage, so I’m broke as fuck, subsisting only because I’m currently staying with my parents over Christmas. I’m still trying to get the money for a job I did for a magazine; the bureaucratic obstacles keep making what I thought was simple hard. When my third attempt to bill this fucking magazine was met with a patronizing dismissal from the company’s accountant, referencing various rules and regulations which I thought I had covered, but apparently had not—it fucking unraveled. I called my mother horrible names; I told her to leave me alone so I could die in piece. I lack a panic button; only a careful schedule of drug-taking can keep me in balance. Right now, having administered said drugs—thankfully orally, not IV in damaged veins—I feel balanced and look upon the incident as both insane, embarrassing, and above all, a horribly selfish lack of self-control.

My mother pretends nothing happened. She’s a fucking saint. I don’t know how I’m going to survive almost a month more with my family and not irreparably break my relationships with them, which is all I have—oh, all the “friends” I’ve made through my insane expeditions into the social world are superficial. When Patrick, having overdone the downers and getting tired and dizzy while visiting a family friend, goes into the bathroom, dumps the contests of a Black Beauty and sniffs it off the bathroom tiles, I could only think, fuck, I wish I had some speed. Speed is just what I need. Of course it’s not. It’s the last thing I need. But jesus fuck it would be great to feel that sting in the nose, which signifies the oncoming rush of euphoria, of motivation, and of fearless social interaction. The chemical drip down the throat. Early in the book, Patrick describes a familiar ritual:

He checked the pills again (lower right pocket) and then the envelope (inside left) and then the credit cards (outer left). This nervous action, which he sometimes performed every few minutes, was like a man crossing himself before an altar — the Drugs; the Cash; and the Holy Ghost of Credit.

I remember doing this: the pills (inner jacket pocket), the debit card (left pants pocket), the smartphone in place of the Holy Ghost of Credit (right pants pocket). While I had no cash, since no one but drug dealers uses cash anymore—even my dealers have moved online—and a smartphone (with Orweb and Orbot installed, two apps that allowed me to access darknet drug markets), the ritual is the same. Not much has changed in essence between 1982 and 2014. When I was in Amsterdam, I’d withdraw 100 euros from an ATM, which would come out as two fifty-euro notes. A smart shop clerk told me no one uses fifties anymore and said he had no change. I found I could ride free on the tram by walking up to the ticket booth inside the tram, a claustrophobic little space with barely enough space for a woman behind the counter, and asking for a day pass (seven-odd euros), and trying to pay for it with a fifty. She had no change, so I simply sat down and took the tram for free, with a clean conscience, since they wouldn’t take my money, and didn’t accept cards either.

Bad News is a short read. It’s a tiring one though, if you emotionally invest in Patrick’s aimless journey. If you don’t, it’s probably tiring for the opposite reason. Yet the book is chock-full of precise, beautiful prose. Toss-away lines punctuate the book with surprising power. “People think they are individuals because they use the word ‘I’ so often.” Or Patrick riding a cab downtown, looking out the window:

Those pencils of steel, chrome fans, and crystal towers that seemed to burst like pure soprano notes from a prima donna’s hideous, pockmarked face, were muffled by darkness. Crossword puzzles of lit and unlit offices slipped by cluelessly. Two lit offices down — call it ‘no’ — and five across. Five-letter word beginning with ‘o’. Oran… one… order. Call it order. No order.

Even skyscrapers passing by a cab window at night become a metaphor for Patrick’s life.

This book is dark, satirical, cynical, bitter as fuck, like trying to swallow a can of pure cocoa powder—but also funny, and insightful, and surprisingly, a page-turner. Why do we keep turning the pages even though nothing much seems to be happening except Patrick loathing the world, mocking the world for its mockability, mocking himself, finding new ways to abuse his body and his mind? Why don’t we just off ourselves, or, in this case, throw the book across the room and wow never to touch it again? Patrick:

As the telephone rang he again wondered what kept him from suicide. Was it something as comtemptible as sentimentality, or hope, or narcissism? No. It was really the desire to know what would happen next, despite the conviction that it was bound to be horrible: the narrative suspense of it all.

Or perhaps funny observations such as this one. Patrick is in a night club desperately looking for anyone vaguely pretty to fuck before his plane departs in the morning—earlier he expresses surprise when the desire for a particular woman, objectified as a girl with an S-shaped spine that plunges her breasts forward and her ass backwards, seductively, temporarily overpowers his desire for drugs—and then he spies some prey:

There she was! With her back to a column and her hands behind her, as if she were tied to a stake, she looked up at the musicians with reverent curiosity. Patrick concentrated madly and imagined her sliding across the floor towards the magnetic field of his chest and stomach. Frowning ferociously, he cast a neurone [sic] net over her body and hauled her in like a heavy catch. He whipped mental lassoes around the colum she stood beside, and brought her staggering across the floor like a bound slave. Finally, he closed his eyes, took flight, and projected his desire through the room, covering her neck and breasts with kisses.

When he opened his eyes she was gone. Maybe he should have tried conversation.

Maybe conversation indeed. But conversation proves hard for Patrick; he is unable to be genuine, finds it difficult, no, impossible to get out of his sarcastic, superior modus operandi. To actually make genuine conversation with a person, to be a Real Human Being, not a solipsistic asshole. His most genuine conversations in the whole book, perhaps, occur, if not inside his own head, with his drug dealer, who says he spent eight years in a mental hospital thinking he was an egg, and who insists that he mix heroin with his cocaine injections, because “it’s medicine,” and who heartlessly cuts him off from the absolutely required seven grams of cocaine a day to only two.

I don’t know if you’ll get as much from this book as I did, but it is one of the best reads I’ve had in a long while. It’s also a book, like Hamsun’s Hunger, that feels so overpowering that you’re glad to have read it, but never want to read it again. Luckily, unlike Hamsun, St Aubyn is also genuinely funny, even if most of the humor is of the gallows variety.