And so we come to the end of winter, Winter 2012. Of all the cold months, February is the one that has nothing else going for it: it is simply wintry. There are no festivities to distract us from the awful weather, or from the promise of better. (This year, there were daffodils.) February does not even have the energy to last as long as the other months, although this year it was only one day shy of a normalish quota. I am always glad to see the end of February.

February 2012 will go down as the month in which I dove into the work of two completely new artists, Edward St Aubyn and Jean Dujardin. One would have been enough; two was deranging. As if to tie the experience in a pretty bow, Mr Dujardin’s Oscar win was followed yesterday by the arrival of A Clue to the Exit, the novel that Mr St Aubyn published in 2000. The little that has been written about this book will tell you that it is “about consciousness,” and maybe it is; maybe it will bog down in the second half just as On the Edge does and read like a brilliant undergraduate’s tour d’horizon of esoteric wisdom. But so far it has been increasingly funny. The narrator is the usual Aubynian fuck-up but his big problem inverts the usual Aubynian situation: he has six months to live (he’s down to five by now), and in order to write something pure and valuable (he has been a highly-rewarded hack) he must divest himself of his anaesthetizing millions. The other thing that’s funny is St Aubyn’s zest for self-parody.When he writes of a sex scene that “[w]e thrashed like marlin caught on the hooks of each other’s unforgiving genitals,” you know — if you’ve been reading as much St Aubyn as I have in one month — that the author is skewering his own verbal virtuosity. You wish that David Foster Wallace had allowed himself moments of such gleeful shamelessness.

Once I’d managed to put down A Clue to the Exit, which gripped me in its tentacles even as I extracted it from the mailing envelope, I thought that I would see what other people have to say about the book on the Internet. I typed in the author’s name and the title, all in quotation marks, and started sifting through the pile of bookseller pages. There was a Guardian review that I read, and a Telegraph review that I didn’t. Three pages in, I finally came across a link to a blog. Unfortunately, the blog was the one that you are reading. The link carried me to an entry in which I mentioned A Clue to the Exit, but of course I had not read it at the time and so had nothing to say about it: what a way to let oneself down. But another nearby link carried me to John Self’s blog, Asylum (silent lately), and his page about At Last, which came out almost a year ao in Britain. Sure enough, his entry and my entry had one thing in common, something that we share with every discussion of At Last that I’ve come across, the “surge in demand” sentence about Emily Price. I should like to know what Edward St Aubyn thinks about the massive popularity among his readers of a sentence about a character who flits through his pentalogy in the space of one or two paragraphs.

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Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 29th, 2012 at 8:01 am.