A Clue to the Exit: A Novel (18 page)
Read A Clue to the Exit: A Novel Online
Authors: Edward St. Aubyn
Tags: #Contemporary Fiction, #Literary, #Literature & Fiction
ALSO BY
EDWARD ST. AUBYN
THE COMPLETE PATRICK MELROSE NOVELS
Never Mind
Bad News
Mother’s Milk
PRAISE FOR THE PATRICK MELROSE NOVELS
“A remarkable cycle of novels … The books are written with an utterly idiosyncratic combination of emotional precision, crystalline observation, and black humor, as if one of Evelyn Waugh’s wicked satires about British aristos had been mashed up with a searing memoir of abuse and addiction, and injected with Proustian meditations on the workings of memory and time.”
—Michiko Kakutani,
The New York Times
“Stunning, sparkling fiction … U
nforgettable.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“One of the great comic writers of our time … [A] sprightly, caustic, and harrowing novel sequence.”
—The New York Review of Books
“Gorgeous, golden prose … St. Aubyn is utterly fearless when faced with the task of unpacking and anatomizing the inner lives of characters. No emotion is so subtle and fleeting he can’t convey it, or so terrifying or shameful that he can’t face it.”
—Lev Grossman,
Time
“One of the most amazing reading experiences I’ve had in a decade.”
—Michael Chabon,
Los Angeles Times
“Parental death, heroin, childhood rape, emotional frigidity, suicide, alcoholism … nothing about the plots can prepare you for the rich, acerbic comedy of St. Aubyn’s world—or more surprising—its philosophical density.”
—Zadie Smith,
Harper’s Magazine
“One of the best fictional cycles in contemporary fiction.”
—
The Boston Globe
“Powerfully aphoristic, lucid prose … On every page of St. Aubyn’s work is a sentence or a paragraph that prompts a laugh, or a moment of enriched comprehension.”
—James Wood,
The New Yorker
“Extraordinary … Acidic humor, stiletto-sharp.”
—Francine Prose
“The best books I’ve read all year.… They’re riotously funny. St. Aubyn writes sentences that are so beautiful it almost hurts to read them. And his dialogue is the best I’ve ever come across. I can’t recommend these books enough.”
—Maria Semple, author of
Where’d You Go, Bernadette
“St. Aubyn writes like an angel. As far as I’m concerned, his books are better than Evelyn Waugh’s.”
—David Ives,
New York Post
“Brilliant … These are addictive and enormously enjoyable novels, full of juicy dialogue, narrative acrobatics, and expert characterization.… A tremendously moving depiction of recovery and survival, without a drop of sentimentality to sully or dilute the experience.”
—Details
“The most brilliant English novelist of his generation.”
—Alan Hollinghurst
“The Melrose novels are among the smartest and most beautiful fictional achievements of the past twenty years.”
—New York Observer
“I read the five Patrick Melrose novels in five days. When I finished, I read them again.”
—Ann Patchett,
The Guardian
(London)
“Take P. G. Wodehouse’s lighthearted country-house tales of the British aristocracy, then dip them in an acid bath of irony, drug abuse, and general decay, and you have
Edward St. Aubyn
’s Patrick Melrose novels.… St. Aubyn’s novels fall into that rare category of books that have been highly praised yet are still somehow underrated.”
—Scott Stossel, editor of
The Atlantic
(The Best Book I Read This Year)
“Highly entertaining and often devastatingly dark … The Melrose novels are modern masterworks of social comedy.”
—Bookforum
“
Edward St. Aubyn
is probably neck-and-neck with Alan Hollinghurst for the title of ‘purest living English prose stylist.’”
—Garth Risk Hallberg,
The Millions
(Most Anticipated Books of the Year)
“Why did it take me so long to fall in love with the brilliant novels of
Edward St. Aubyn
?”
—Bret Easton Ellis
“The Melrose novels are a masterwork for the twenty-first century, written by one of the great prose stylists in England.”
—Alice Sebold, author of
The Lovely Bones
“Hilarious and insightful, with a sinister tint and pitch-perfect dialogue … St. Aubyn’s sentences were the best I read this year.… I’m addicted to St. Aubyn.”
—Elliott Holt, author of
You Are One of Them
“These [novels], covering more than forty years, add up to something incontestably grand, the nearest we have today to the great cycles of upper-class English life published in the decades after the war.”
—The London Review of Books
“Heartbreaking and delicious.”
—
Anthony Bourdain
“Telling someone how much you loved
Edward St. Aubyn
’s Patrick Melrose novels has become something of a cliché, and lately achieves one of two responses: either the remark, ‘Oh, people keep recommending them to me,’ or, more frequently, ‘Yes, aren’t they wonderful?’ which then begins a long, satisfying, somewhat fetishistic conversation about which one of the novels is your favorite, and why.”
—Meg Wolitzer, author of
The Interestings
“Dialogue as amusing as Waugh’s and narrative even more deft than Graham Greene’s.”
—Edmund White
“The bravura quality of St. Aubyn’s performance is irresistible. Brilliant.”
—
The Sunday Telegraph
(London)
“A master of dark comedy and difficult truths, St. Aubyn is one of contemporary literature’s finest novelists.”
—Bob Edwards
“St. Aubyn is a staggeringly good prose stylist and evidently has a big and open heart.”
—
The Times
(London)
“These books are hilarious and terrifying, shot through with pain and wisdom and written in the most extraordinary cold, pure style: rockets of wit exploding like flares to highlight the bleakness of the terrain.”
—Independent on Sunday
(London)
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A CLUE TO THE EXIT. Copyright © 2000 by Edward St. Aubyn. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
St. Aubyn, Edward, 1960–
A clue to the exit: a novel / Edward St. Aubyn.—First U.S. edition.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-250-04603-1 (trade paperback)
ISBN 978-1-250-04604-8 (e-book)
1. Authors—Fiction. 2. Women gamblers—Fiction. 3. Terminally ill—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6069.T134C58 2015
823'.914—dc23
2015018598
e-ISBN 9781250046048
Originally published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus
First U.S. Edition: September 2015
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