Self’s the Man: In At Last, on Goes Edward St. Aubyn’s Sordid Saga of the Melrose Clan
Patrick Melrose used to be an alcoholic, back when he was still a husband—though some time after his stint as a heroin addict, which was when he was young. Back then, Patrick was still rich. Not, to be sure, “as rich as God,” like “the Tescos,” yet certainly rich enough for a spot of sin. “Ten thousand [dollars] in two days,” he thinks in Bad News (1992), after lighting through a gram of heroin, six of cocaine and a crowd of lesser chemicals on a trip to New York. “Nobody could say he didn’t know how to have fun.” (The exception, of course, being Patrick himself: “I might as well have been shooting up a vial of my own tears.”) It was back then, when he was in his late 20s and still measured out his trust fund with blackened spoons, that Patrick identified his “type”: the “Hiso Bitch.” “The Hiso Bitch,” Patrick reminisces, “had to be … glamorous, intensely social, infinitely rich in the pursuit of pleasure, embedded among beautiful possessions. As if this was not enough (as if this was not too much), she also had to be sexually voracious and morally disoriented.” Read More
