Bastards 
James Wood
- Mother’s Milk by Edward St Aubyn
Can you always count on a bastard for a fancy prose style? It is hard to imagine the fiction of Edward St Aubyn stripped of the cool silver of its style. I am not accusing St Aubyn of being a bastard; I mean that he writes very well about bastards, and that both their contempt for the world and St Aubyn’s contempt for them find their best expression in a certain kind of intelligent, frozen stylishness. His upper-class snobs, perverts, tyrants, addicts and solipsists speak aphoristically, amusingly, cleverly, disdainfully; and the high polish of St Aubyn’s own prose is almost indistinguishable from theirs. Evelyn Waugh is often invoked by reviewers of St Aubyn, but Jane Austen and Henry James might be equal influences, the Austen and James whose drawing-room performers are in some ways inseparable, stylistically at least, from the authors’ own performances.
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James Wood’s How Fiction Works is just out. He is also the author of The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief and is a staff writer at the New Yorker.
Other articles by this contributor:
At the tent flap sin crouches · The Fleshpots of Egypt
Nothing in a Really Big Way · Adam Mars-Jones
Puffed Wheat · How serious is John Bayley?
Credulity · ‘Life of Pi’
Addicted to Unpredictability · Knut Hamsun
A Frog’s Life · Coetzee’s Confessions
Mixed Feelings · Italo Svevo’s Last Cigarette
Fundamentally Goyish · Zadie Smith
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