Book Review: A Clue to the Exit

A Clue to the Exitby Edward St. AubynPicador, 2015The good folks at Picador have seen fit to fill a small gap: they've brought out – in an attractive paperback – A Clue to the Exit, the 2000 Edward St. Aubyn novel that was the only work by this author not yet available in an American version. St. Aubyn is famous now for his sequence of Patrick Melrose novels, which were praised far and wide; Michiko Kakutani called them “remarkable,” Lev Grossman called them “gorgeous,” Michael Chabon called them “amazing,” and even the old lady who reviews the same novel every week for the Silver Spring Scold gushed that they were “not entirely rebarbative.”Those Patrick Melrose books threw fire and splashed acid. They were written in the author's late twenties, sharpened into spikes of vinegary eloquence worthy of Waugh, and hurled through the parlor window of the Republic of Letters without warning or apology. They were so good they cast the author's subsequent works a bit into the shadow of anticlimax, forcing reviewers confronting such books as On the Edge or Lost for Words to ransack their Rolodexes of euphemisms.That somewhat hapless exigency will only be worsened by the appearance of A Clue to the Exit in American bookstores. It's the story of arrogant, prosperous screenwriter Charlie Fairburn – cheating ex-husband, clueless, distant father – who's told by his doctor that he has only six months to live. He decides to seize his entire net worth and indulge himself in an enormous, protracted last hurrah. He goes to Monte Carlo intent on gambling everything away. At the casino he meets an alluring woman named Angelique who acts inadvertently as a kind of muse for a new work that comes pouring out of Fairburn in direct proportion to the deepening of their torrid sexual affair.The book is only 185 pages long, but you'll swear you're wandering in the humid fens of that sexual affair for a solid 500. Like accidentally swallowing a mosquito, you'll gulp on a passage like this one:

Her hazel eyes threw out sparks of green fire from behind the loose spirals of her golden-brown hair. We looked at each other with unassailable hunger, knowing that sex would only usher us into an Ethiopia of desire where we would taste even more keenly the tragic knowledge that true intimacy cannot be shared.

You'll spit it out, gasping, only to swallow something like this:

She drew blood with her nails and sucked the wounds like the flavour from a water ice. I rolled my forehead against hers, trying to break through the fortress of our lonely skulls and meld our yearning minds. We thrashed like marlins caught on the hooks of each other's unforgiving genitals.

Gagging, retching, you'll stagger on, certain it can't get worse and being so terribly, terribly wrong about that:

The fire of our love, which was like a blowtorch the first time we met, is now a burning forest, leaping rivers and consuming landscapes. She knows that I'm always thinking about death and I know that she's always longing to gamble. We reprieved each other, with every touch. With momentary impersonations, we flicked through the index cards of all our identities, and then burnt the file. There was nobody left for us to be except exactly who we are, doubly naked on an unprecedented dawn.

All of this may very well be offered in a kind of hyper-extended drollery – when it comes to cleverness, this particular author is capable of nearly anything. But in the entire course of A Clue to the Exit, there are no buoys to mark that kind of channel; it all reads as though it's offered more or less sincerely. Nothing about Charlie Fairburn's predicament, adventures, or eventual insights has the least hint of originality, and the signature St. Aubyn knowing wink is the second shoe that never falls. By the novel's final pages, even the most generous reader will wish A Clue to the Exit were back on the import-only lists, the worry of completists and collectors rather than the frustration of readers expecting more than the standard wacky six-months-to-live routine.