At Last: A Novel [Hardcover]

Edward St. Aubyn (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 31, 2012

A New York Times Notable Book of 2012

One of The Telegraph’s Best Fiction Books 2011

One of Esquire's Best Books of 2012

One of TIME's Top 10 Fiction Books of 2012

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 Americam 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

With this title, St. Aubyn caps his five-volume cycle of Melrose novels. Patrick Melrose, introduced as a five-year-old in Never Mind (originally published in Great Britain in 1992), is now a middle-aged divorced alcoholic barrister living in a bedsit. As in the previous books, events in At Last take place over the course of a single day; in this case, the day of Patrick’s mother’s funeral. Despite his loss and his reduced circumstances, and having survived a past marked by abuse and drug addiction, Patrick has “at last” found a measure of peace. With lacerating humor and razor-sharp imagery, St. Aubyn continues to work out his themes: the follies of the British upper class, “the psychological impact of inherited wealth,” the complex dynamics between parent and child. Picador has also brought out the four other Patrick Melrose novels (Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother’s Milk, in addition to At Last) in a single volume, a great favor to American readers. --Mary Ellen Quinn

From Bookforum

At Last is still a terrific comedy of manners, and St. Aubyn's writing is as elegant and bright as always, but his leading man has become a bit tiresome. —Eric Banks

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (January 31, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374298890
• ISBN-13: 978-0374298890
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #331,703 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 48 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Move toward understanding, not blame February 22, 2012

By Brian R. Lemaire

Format:Hardcover

As someone who just lost his mother two weeks before picking up the novel At Last, I found this book particularly resonant. It centers on the psychological changes Patrick Melrose goes through at the funeral of his mother. A healing process, coming to terms and getting past some of the abuse Patrick suffered at the hands of his father, the complicity of his ineffectual mother, and finally, a striving for greater free will in his life and repairing a relationship with his own wife and sons - an attempt to address life by responding to it, not in a more limited way, reacting to it.

Along the way we get comic relief from Fleur, a batty lady who adheres to fringe Eastern religious beliefs and from the unique Nicholas Pratt. Mr. Pratt, a snarky, opinionated, educated older gentleman, shows up at the funeral and bestows his sarcasm on anyone within range. Overall in this book though, class is a setting, not a central subject.

The depth of understanding, the intelligence about the human condition St. Aubyn shows in this book puts it in the same league as "Let the Great World Spin" by Colum McCann and more recently, "The Sense of an Ending" by Julian Barnes. The British Invasion!

30 of 34 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Kid's All Right March 2, 2012

By E. Keats

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Okay, reading is what I do. It's my joy, pain, school, friend, church. I'm that kind of addict. But never, ever has a character become such a part of me that I've dreamed about him. Last night Patrick, Robert, and Thomas Melrose all entered my dreams. Patrick is a part of me. His brilliant mind, his pain, his laugh-out-loud wit, his audacious courage in facing who he is and who his parents are (or aren't) have apparently found a home both in my conscious and subconscious mind. God, I just love these books. While reviewers compare St. Aubyn to everyone from Austin to Waugh, I've never read anyone quite like him: funny, excruciatingly painful, philosophical, psychological, satirical, political, romantic, all in beautiful, elegant prose that makes me sigh. I never underline novels, but these books begged to be underlined.

No Patrick is no longer a kid, but since we begin to care about him when he's just 5 and we see him grow and regress, learn and unlearn, come within a whisper of dying and then heal, we care for him the way we do with those we've loved over a long time. And we root for them in a deep, real way. So when Patrick decides to leave the lonely bedsit and make that phone call, well I took a long, happy deep breath and wished them all the best.

By the way, the reviewers who complain about the boys clearly don't know any precocious children. I find them both believable and damn adorable, and I've known a few small people who could hold their own with both of them.

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars If you've followed the trilogy, five stars, as a stand-alone, slightly less August 30, 2011

By Ripple

Format:Paperback

In "At Last", Edward St Aubyn returns to the Melrose family, the subject of both "Some Hope" and of his Booker-shortlisted "Mother's Milk". I confess that I have still not got around to reading the first of the trilogy, but loved "Mother's Milk" and found that I wasn't greatly disadvantaged by not having read the previous book. "At Last" could also be read as a stand-alone book, but I wouldn't advise this approach. You will miss out on so much that if you are planning on reading it, you really should read at least "Mother's Milk" first. This isn't much of an inconvenience as it's a terrific book.

I'd also add that if you are thinking of taking this route, you might want to stop reading this review at this point. While it's possible to give a taste of "At Last" without spoilers, the story follows on from "Mother's Milk", so the very set up means that if you don't want to know what happens, you might want to look away now.

St Aubyn's subjects are very much the upper class elite - and their self-centred behaviour as they squander their inheritances. That might not be to everyone's taste as a subject matter and certainly it isn't the life that most of us lead. But he sends them up beautifully and you will soon be laughing and shaking your head at their attitudes. St Aubyn's style is waspishly funny - for me, he is like a slightly more literary, English version of Brett Easton Ellis. There's a similar level of shock and bad behaviour, but he's a more humane writer than Easton Ellis.

OK, so I'm hoping that all those who plan on reading "Mother's Milk" have now left the room so I can reveal that the setting for "At Last" is the funeral of Eleanor - the mother who so infuriated her son Patrick in "Mother's Milk". As various characters, some of whom will be familiar from the earlier books. gather to see her off, most of them are wrapped up in their own thoughts and obsessions. There's the new age advocate Annette, the curmudgeonly family friend Nicholas Pratt and the supremely selfish Aunt Nancy to name but a few. At least Patrick seems to have recovered from some of his former vices, but will Eleanor's passing allow him to finally make peace with the past? St Aubyn is adept at creating a clear picture of these eccentrics with a few deft descriptions.

It's certainly true that most readers won't identify much with St Aubyn's eccentric and wealthy characters and if that means that you will struggle to build an emotional bond to them, then this book may not be for you.

St Aubyn's wickedly funny observations drip off almost every page. He delivers one line observations that would do any stand up comic proud, all wrapped in an intelligent and thoughtful prose style. There are a number of laugh out loud moments as well as some thoughtful investigation of the psychological damage that people inherit from their parents. The whole book is set on one day at the crematorium and the subsequent wake - and St Aubyn is certainly not the first writer to recognise the comic potential of these events which gather disparate people together. All knew Eleanor in different ways, and perhaps Patrick's experience of her is not the whole story.

It's a very satisfying conclusion to "Mother's Milk", but I'm less convinced that it stands as well as a novel in it's own right. It's more the conclusion of a story arc started elsewhere than a satisfying read in itself.