Bedtime Reading (3)
No, not the second volume in Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose trilogy. Bad News. The hero, whom we last saw being beaten by his father with his father's leather bedroom slipper (in my time and place, it was hairbrush), now 20-something, goes to New York to collect his father's ashes--and I grant you there are some very funny passages, as when he takes the ashes on to dinner, and his hosteass asks "Is that your father you've got there?" and instructs the maid or the butler to set another place.
I didn't want to know this much about cocaine and heroine and Quaaludes, not to mention needles, dirty and clean, bent, straight, crooked, disposed off, and veins and dealers...it was so terrifying (do I feel vulnerable?) that I, as they say in French, read diagonally. It's gone. Gone.
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