Disability Books #4: Edward St Aubyn's "Parallel Lines." Plus recent bylines
An appreciation of Edward St Aubyn's depiction of schizophrenia in "Parallel Lines," plus a roundup of recent interviews & criticism.
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The sporadic nature of this newsletter means that I’ve built up quite a few bylines since I last sent out an update. A more organized person would send out brief emails with these links but… my executive function capabilities are mostly dedicated to actually making these articles happen.
Here’s a brief rundown of what I’ve been doing for the last few months:
This past week, I interviewed Starre Vartan for Jezebel about her new book The Stronger Sex, which looks at the strengths of the female body and how cultural norms have shaped our ideas of male vs. female capabilities.
Also for Jezebel, I wrote about Jamie Hood’s memoir Trauma Plot and Christine Murphy’s novel Notes on Surviving the Fire, which approach writing about rape in different but brilliant ways.
Last month, I interviewed the great Susan Choi for The Sewanee Review’s website about her incredible new novel Flashlight.
For Electric Lit, I spoke to the utterly brilliant novelist Pip Adam, who hails from New Zealand, about her new experimental novel Audition, which uses a set-up involving giants on a spaceship to interrogate prison.
For CrimeReads, I spoke to Michelle Young about her fascinating book The Art Spy, a biography of French resistance hero Rose Valland and a wider examination of Nazi looting. Grimly relevant to the current moment!
And finally I had an essay on Rosalind Brown’s wonderful novel Practice in the latest issue of The Denver Quarterly (59.3). But that’s only available in print!
Whew!
Edward St Aubyn’s autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels are probably my favorite piece of writing by a living writer; I have read the first three of the five novels that make up the series over and over again, and have a habit of bringing them up in interviews with other writers. I can’t help myself! (In my experience, St Aubyn is a “writer’s writer” in that other writers tend to adore him more than the public at large.)
Since At Last, St Aubyn’s work has been scattershot: his post-Melrose novels, which haven’t been autobiographical, have lacked a sense of urgency; while always beautifully written, I have found them brilliant at moments and at others contrived (and sometimes sexist). But I have always been giddy with excitement at the announcement of a new St Aubyn novel, knowing that he has the potential to write a masterpiece.
His most recent book, Parallel Lines, published this past June, is easily the best thing he has written since the Melrose novels. A sequel to 2021’s Double Blind, Parallel Lines follows a pair of twins who were separated at birth: Olivia was adopted by the well-to-do Carrs, a pair of psychoanalysts, while Sebastian was kept by their birth mother until he was also given up. He has lived a much more difficult life, and struggles with schizophrenia. In the previous installment, Dr. Martin Carr realizes that his patient Sebastian is his daughter’s twin; somewhat implausibly, he continues treating him while trying to figure out how to disentangle himself from the situation. This bombshell threatens to explode in Parallel Lines, which takes place five years or so after the events of Double Blind.
Though Sebastian was a supporting character in Double Blind, he is central to Parallel Lines, and the novel’s greatest strength lies in St Aubyn’s ability to render his inner life. In Bad News, the second Melrose novel, St Aubyn depicts his own experience of psychosis while struggling with heroin addiction and the aftereffects of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of his father. In one bravura, but highly disturbing, scene, Patrick adopts numerous personae while staying in a New York hotel, speaking in their voices. As he told LitHub in 2015, “Patrick is basically someone who is a millimetre away from schizophrenia.”
“For those first 25 years I had a false self surrounding this swirling chaos. I had no real sense of self at all, which gave a sort of sinister plasticity to my mimicry. It was easier for me to be someone else than myself at any given point, so mimicry was a pathologically based necessity, because I had to say something,” he explained. Writer John Freeman goes on to add that “There was a time when, in his twenties, St. Aubyn would sit in his drawing room and conduct a 20-person play, jumping from seat to seat, performing all the different voices.” While St Aubyn is not schizophrenic, and managed (as he says) to transmute this impulse into the writing of fiction—another act that requires the adoption of multiple voices—he obviously has a greater understanding of psychosis than I do, as someone who has never experienced it.
While I can’t assess the “accuracy” of Sebastian’s inner monologue in Parallel Lines, since I’m also not schizophrenic, I was dazzled by St Aubyn’s ability and willingness to imagine himself into a character whose mind is fluid and associative to the point of confusion and, yes, psychosis. Sebastian’s schizophrenia, appropriately for a character in a novel, is primarily triggered by (and preoccupied with) language, and his language pings around from one idea to the next, jumping from meaning to meaning, incorporating song lyrics, sayings, and slogans. The wrong words can trigger a highly distressed response, and the flood of associations in his mind can be distressing and overwhelming, but they are also creative. Early in the novel, when Sebastian is hospitalized after becoming obsessed with a woman at work, he thinks:
When you thought about it, thought, Sebastian, ‘thought-provoking’ was the stupidest phrase ever invented, because there was nothing, literally nothing, including ‘nothing’, that didn't provoke a thought. If anyone could find something that didn't provoke a thought, they would make a bloody fortune. … Even Clozapine, which was tailor-made to turn Sebastian into a moron, provoked the thought that he wished he hadn't taken it.
This is a form of literary analysis; close reading, if you will: Sebastian is disdainful of the mundane phrase “thought-provoking” because, as an expert in language and in the unavoidable fact of consciousness, he realizes that it essentially means nothing. But this passage also betrays how powerless Sebastian is not to analyze language: his own, and that of those around him.
Later in the novel, Sebastian is distressed after finally meeting his Bio Mum: his mother does not handle the meeting well, and he is shocked to learn that he has a twin (Olivia, also present). In his rage afterward, St Aubyn shows how Sebastian breaks down and recycles his own language in his internal monologue:
Thank god he was seeing Dr Carr tomorrow, because psychologically, in psycho logic, he had probably been imagining she was still the same age she had been when he was a bun in the oven. He had longed for her to be young and pretty and incredibly cheerful, so they could make a fresh start and turn him into Aladdin instead of a lad insane. He had arrested her development to free himself from his own arrested development. He was going to tell Dr Carr his interpretation and, without getting his hopes up, he thought it was just the sort of thing Dr Carr would think was bang on target.
Is “psycho logic,” a phrase derived from the more conventional “psychologically,” the logic of psychology or the logic of a “psycho”? (Sebastian sometimes derisively refers to himself using terms like this, but he also, with unwitting prescience, calls Dr Carr his “Psycho Dad.”) Having previously referenced the David Bowie song “Changes,” Sebastian now invokes “Aladdin Sane,” but breaks the name down into parts. Sebastian’s language is constantly repeating and re-forming itself, finding new meanings and new patterns in his words: a trait that is both creative, as I’ve said, and inhibiting, a form of “arrested development.”
Unfortunately, Sebastian’s “Psycho Dad” is actually his sister’s real dad, but despite this wrinkle, St Aubyn presents their relationship as a fruitful collaboration. St Aubyn has long been invested in exploring psychoanalysis on the page, and this novel may be the peak of that exploration to date. Rather than simply writing about therapy, Sebastian and Dr. Carr’s collaboration is a full exploration of Freudian psychoanalysis, which attaches symbolic meaning to a patient’s speech. For some patients, this approach would be tedious or overly precious; for Sebastian, though, whose life is a text, psychoanalysis gives him the analytical tools to analyze and process his own thoughts and by extension his own life. He is excited to tell Dr Carr his “interpretation” of his emotional reaction in the passage above—which he renders through playful and recursive language—and this impulse recurs through the novel. Eventually, of course, Sebastian will have to separate from Dr Carr, given their personal connection; but this will be another form of maturation and growth—one that St Aubyn will no doubt explore in the promised sequel to this book.
Parallel Lines is not a perfect novel: some of the other characters, held over from Double Blind, are significantly less engaging than Sebastian, and some of the conversations between other characters can feel indistinct: everyone speaks with the same intensely clever voice. (This is particularly odd given St Aubyn’s gift for dialogue in his previous novels.) Yet I found myself happy to forgive these flaws in light of the significant achievements of Parallel Lines: its generous, electric rendering of a character outside of the mainstream. I haven’t read many novels that attempt to depict schizophrenia, period, and even fewer (in fact, I can think of none) that embody the inner life of a schizophrenic character with this level of humanity. This should be praised, and receive attention, not only because it is unusual but also because St Aubyn manages it with such deftness and humor, making Parallel Lines a joy to read.