The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels

By Edward St. Aubyn (2015)

1. Addiction, childhood rape, suicide and narcissism are just some of the themes of this dark, transfixing quintet, published between 1992 and 2012. The semiautobiographical books follow Patrick from his traumatic childhood in England and France (he is raped by his father, routinely dismissed by an alcoholic mother), through his drug-dependent 20s and eventually to the challenges of having his own family. Edward St. Aubyn brilliantly and fanatically fleshes out the terrorized insides of Patrick’s divided self: Voices and characters clatter in his head. “Forget heroin,” he says. “Try giving up irony, that deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.” He tries, several times, to kill himself with drugs and booze. Himself an aristocratic insider, Mr. St. Aubyn is excellent on the cold self-loathing that goes with psychological disturbance in the British upper classes. Among a rotating cast of pedophiles and addicts and bullies, we feel only for Patrick. With characteristic dark wit, Mr. St. Aubyn writes: “Suicide wore the mask of self-rejection; but in reality nobody took his personality more seriously than the person who was planning to kill himself on its instructions. Nobody was more determined to stay in charge at any cost, to force the most mysterious aspect of life into their own imperious schedule.”

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Dept. of Speculation

By Jenny Offill (2014)

2. “Dept. of Speculation” charts the slow dissolution of a marriage in short, understated fragments of prose. As the narrator’s husband embarks on an affair, the narrator becomes, simply, “the wife.” In a state of muted estrangement from herself, she beholds her anger, rotates it, examines it from unusual angles. Jenny Offill’s tone is wry, searching, submerged under the weight of the narrator’s refusal to dramatize her predicament. In her traumatized state, her child is her only consolation, “the smell of her hair. The way she clasped her hand around my fingers. This was like medicine. For once, I didn’t have to think. The animal was ascendant.” Early on, the narrator confesses that her “plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella.” On the surface, the book concerns itself with the mundane elements of marriage (she hates his glasses, he hates her bangs). But by evoking the material of her own relationship in sharp, discrete notes, the narrator—the artist—enacts a quiet revenge.

Family Life

By Akhil Sharma (2014)

3. Soon after the Mishras immigrate to New York from India in 1979, 14-year-old Birju hits his head inside a swimming pool and never speaks or moves again. The Mishras’ lives are upended by the tragedy: Birju’s younger brother, Ajay, narrates the trauma of a household severed by grief and rage. Akhil Sharma’s prose is clear, flat, darkly humorous. In high school, Ajay begins to imitate the writing of Hemingway. “As I wrote,” he thinks, “I felt proud at my toughness for taking whatever was happening to me and turning it into something else.” The novel’s action is confined to the Mishras’ small Queens, N.Y., apartment, in which misery hangs thick in the air. Mr. Mishra drinks heavily. Mrs. Mishra leans on prayer and the mutterings of priests. “Thank you,” Mr. Mishra says to his son’s nurse. “Don’t say ‘thank you,’ ” says his wife. “If you do, they will think you’re weak.” Raised in the shadow of such rage and powerlessness, a traumatized Ajay becomes the beating heart of this tale.

Homeland Elegies

By Ayad Akhtar (2020)

4. Part fiction, part memoir, Ayad Akhtar’s “Homeland Elegies” dissects the trauma of Muslim American self-identity in post-9/11 New York. The narrator, also named Ayad, says at one point: “I was going to stop pretending that I felt American.” What America increasingly appears to symbolize is the ability to succeed, to buy oneself out of sticky situations. With horror, the narrator notes his own transformation into a “neoliberal courtier.” He watches his father’s descent into alcoholism and his mother’s distaste for the U.S. “You’re one of them now. Write about them. Don’t write about us,” she tells her son, referring to Americans. Documenting the hypervigilance of 21st-century American Muslims, Mr. Akhtar deftly evokes the pain of suddenly feeling like an outsider. But it is in the smaller moments, in the narrator’s tenderness for his father as he struggles with debt and alcoholism, that the book is most affecting.

Outline

By Rachel Cusk (2014)

5. A novel in 10 conversations, “Outline” follows a novelist teaching a weeklong creative-writing class in Athens, Greece. The plot is the superficial premise onto which Rachel Cusk grafts the real drama: the narrator-novelist’s trauma in the aftermath of her divorce. We are not permitted to directly glimpse her pain; she is a cipher who encourages others to confess their own. Away from the classroom—in restaurants and on boats—strangers speak to her of their ordeals. As a Greek man ruminates endlessly about his divorce, offering up the gloomy trajectory of his life, and the narrator listens and parses his words, we discover her own flattened sorrow—her inability to speak at length. “The story of men and women, for me,” says the divorced Greek, “was ultimately a story of war to the extent that I wondered sometimes whether I had an actual horror of peace.” In a moment of plain-spoken honesty, the narrator admits to feelings she describes as “my own fears and desires manifested outside myself” and seeing “in other people’s lives a commentary on my own.” Her quiet watchfulness is both a byproduct of, and a conduit for, her repressed trauma.