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Summary
Summary
A beautifully modulated novel that shows Edward St. Aubyn at his sparkling best
Charlie Fairburn, successful screenwriter, ex-husband, and absent father, has been given six months to live. He resolves to stake half his fortune on a couple of turns of the roulette wheel and, to his agent's disgust, to write a novel-about death. In the casino he meets his muse. Charlie grows as addicted to writing fiction as she is to gambling.
His novel is set on a train and involves a group of characters (familiar to readers of St. Aubyn's earlier work) who are locked in a debate about the nature of consciousness. As this train gets stuck at Didcot, and Charlie gets more passionately entangled with the dangerous Angelique, A Clue to the Exit comes to its startling climax. Exquisitely crafted, witty, and thoughtful, Edward St. Aubyn's dazzling novel probes the very heart of being.
Author Notes
EDWARD ST. AUBYN was born in London in 1960. He is the author of Lost for Words , On the Edge and The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mothers Milk. His final Patrick Melrose novel is the standalone At Last. Mother's Milk was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Linguistic legerdemain enlivens this short, sharp, often funny, occasionally moving novel about a British screenwriter who, when told he has six months to live, sets about writing a novel. Best known for the movie Aliens with a Human Heart, Charlie finds himself in his final days alienated from his ex-wife (who keeps their London house even though her spiritual home is Tibet), his New York agent, and his friends. Moreover, throughout his travels, he is too restless to stay in his house in St. Tropez, or a luxury Monte Carlo hotel, or Toulon's red light district, or the desert, holding fast to two obsessions: longing to reconnect with his daughter and a determination to write something important. Interspersed with Charlie's personal narrative are excerpts from his novel, a third-person description of people meeting on a train after a conference on consciousness. Cross-references abound: the hero of Charlie's novel is named Patrick (a nod to St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose series), fellow travellers Crystal and Peter (in the novel within the novel) appeared in St. Aubyn's novel, On the Edge, and Charlie's novel's tentative title is On the Train. Both novels provide laugh-out-loud moments, as St. Aubyn remains the preeminent satirist of a meaningless New Age search for meaning. What makes this effort compelling is Charlie's painfully honest, unremittingly self-aware account of his emotional journey, drawing readers down with him into a "narrowing funnel of time." (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
If you can see the end coming from a long way off, do you rush toward it or head in the opposite direction? Therein lies a question to be wrestled withand so St. Aubyn (On the Edge, 2014, etc.) does. Charlie Fairburn, the screenwriter of such immortal flicks as Aliens with a Human Heart ("perhaps you were one of the fifty-three million people who paid to see it"), has six months to live. Does he head out to sail around the world, climb great peaks, see the most important museums in the most beautiful cities? Nope. Now that he's put aside the possibility of killing himself for a minute or two, Charlie nurses ambitions that are somewhat less involved: he decides he's going to write the novel he dreamed about when he was young, explore the ideas that captivated him in college. Never mind that his agent will go ballistic: there are ways of working around Arnie Cornfield, whose name and manner are clichs as much as are his words, even if St. Aubyn doesn't quite have American English, and especially Hollywood American English, down. ("The audience have gotta leave the movie with a smile on their faces," he writes, Britishly.) Prozac and potage in tummy, Charlie sets to work, penning a yarn that reeks of Waiting for Godot and undergraduate courses in the nature of consciousness and suchlike things: "She hardly recognized the argumentative intellectual she had driven to psychedelic insanity in the Utah desert five years ago, the man who declared the scandal' of pure Being, and announced the death of Nature.' " Charlie's slim novel is and will always be an acquired taste, but it makes a nice distraction while he's waiting for the end. But did someone say deus ex machina? St. Aubyn turns in a curious confection, well-crafted as always but rather insubstantial for all its philosophical explorations; it's certainly more cheerful than his Melrose novels (At Last, 2012, etc.), but even though it's still brimming with mordant humor and venom (and, for that matter, plenty of inside jokes to please faithful readers), it seems a detour from the weightier, psychologically richer stuff of old. Though with plenty of good moments, this ranks as lesser work by an author who's done much better. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Screenwriter Charlie Fairburn is dying of cirrhosis and has six months to live. He determines to write a novel, something honest and complete, before he dies and chooses consciousness as his subject. He's on, then off Prozac. He sells his house in St. Tropez and goes to Monte Carlo to gamble all the money away. He meets Angélique and offers her a million francs a day to lose his money for him, but their passionate affair ends when the money is gone. Charlie moves on to a seedy hotel in Toulon, then to a nearby island, where he is awed by the beauty of nature, and then to the Sahara. His novel, which adds another layer of narrative, takes place on a train and features three characters (familiar from earlier St. Aubyn novels) who are returning to London from a consciousness conference in Oxford and spend their time engaged in the great consciousness debate. Mordant, moving, shot through with incandescent prose, the latest of St. Aubyn's novels made available in the U.S. (it was published in Britain in 2000) is a must for fans.--Quinn, Mary Ellen Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"THOSE OF US who are dying," Charlie Fairburn writes toward the end of this sparkling and morbid confession of a novel, "as opposed to those who are lounging around in their studies making dinner engagements, and then reluctantly disconnecting the phone for 20 minutes in order to browse through a medieval textbook and look up some realistic details - those of us who are really dying haven't got time to ponder the past. The present is scintillating with horror and precision." So concludes Charlie, a hack screenwriter who, having been told he has only a few months to live, decides to throw everything to the wind, abandon his dispiriting Hollywood projects and devote himself to the serious intellectual novel he has always dreamed of creating - while simultaneously blowing through all his cash. To whom has this delicious premise not occurred? In lesser - or even just other - hands, this fragile comic gambit would soon run out of steam. That it doesn't do so is owing to two cardinal virtues: the brevity and the unslacking tension within Edward St. Aubyn's prose. There's a third virtue too, though it's trickier: a controlled, manic excess that brings to the surface the central character's simmering madness. Charlie's prospective novel is about the nature of consciousness, which of course ensures that it's a labor both for us and for him. It rolls through "A Clue to the Exit" in the form of a novel-within-a-novel in which three characters (in search of an exit, you could say) sit on a train bound for Paddington Station. This being England, the train naturally breaks down in the dreary town of Didcot, but that only encourages Charlie's characters to ponder in triangulated fashion the mysteries of consciousness and their maddening place within it. Or their lack of place within it. For most of the novel, Jean-Paul, Patrick and Crystal never leave the train, but they never need to. The drama is all in their consciousness. Writing "On the Train," this abortive tale of spiraling self-awareness and philosophical speculation, is perhaps just a way for Charlie to prepare himself for death while doing the things that really inspire him - like gambling in a casino in the South of France and having sex with a dubious and venal goddess named Angélique. Certainly, Charlie seems to return to this alternate narrative of downward-hurtling hedonism with as much relish and relief as we do. In a wonderful comic set piece at the beginning of Charlie's roller coaster ride toward his medically predicted demise, the hapless writer finally confesses to his terrifying Hollywood agent, Arnie, that he intends to write a serious novel as a means of erecting his own literary tombstone, not another of the tawdry movie scripts Arnie and millions love. They're in a restaurant eating lobster, and the agent explodes in disbelief, an anger with which his half-consumed crustacean can barely interfere: "'It's a novel,' I said. "Although he had a claw sticking out of each corner of his mouth, Arnie's indignation allowed him no pause. "'An ovel!' The claws appeared to become animated as he mumbled. 'Ovelist is the schmuck gets aid peanuts for the wights if, ig if he finds a producer.' "'It's about consciousness,' I persisted. "Arnie spat out the claws. They clattered onto the plate, the flesh sucked from their shattered exoskeletons. "'What's the story line?' he mocked. 'Consciousness meets consciousness, they become super-conscious and live consciously ever after?' "'You must be psychic,' I said." Having liquidated his assets, Charlie moves into a luxurious Côte d'Azur hotel filled with characters straight out of "La Grande Bellezza." These include an aging Italian film director, called simply the Maestro, who is driven around by a chauffeur dressed as one of the charioteers in "Ben Hur." When ambulatory, he totters between two models wearing nurses' uniforms, speaking with a fabulous accent. ("'In the '60s,' he said, walking over to the railing at the edge of the sea, 'there arose around Godard a group of directors who asked the question, "Qu'est-ce que c'est le cinéma?"'") Also on the scene, albeit briefly, is a "blue-rinse" countess with "wrinkles as fine as anything in a Holbein portrait," who dies the very day after Charlie insults her, exasperated at having to respond to a silly but innocent question. And, of course, there's Angelique, who appears as if out of nowhere: "A strikingly beautiful woman walked into the bar where, despite my liver condition, I had just finished my seventh espresso." She's ready to copulate in exchange for his remaining assets. All in all, it seems a fair deal. As his terror of death increases and his novel expands, Charlie sits in rooms decorated with expensive Zuber wallpaper, eating potage de légumes jardinières and trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter and his even more estranged ex-wife, who has become a devotee of the Tibetan cults. Since Himalayan religious practices seem inimical to marital reconciliation, the attempt fails. Charlie's endof-life binge also begins to lose its thrill. He realizes that giving all his money to the tempestuous Angelique isn't a diversion that can sweeten his fate. Of course, death is still a great subject. And death in Cap Ferrat might even have the echo-chamber resonance of its more famous Venetian counterpart: "Death and writing go so well together because the unbearable everything - the chalk squealing on the blackboard, the Albinoni at full volume, the Othello-felling jealousy - can all be vaporized on the hot plate of wild indiscretion. And, at the same time, nothing changes: The chalk squeals on, the violins scrape our heartstrings, Othello dies in a pool of green blood, worrying about his reputation." FINALLY BROKE, ABANDONED by Angelique, Charlie moves to a shabby hotel in Toulon and then to the island of Porquerolles. It's here that the second wonderful comic set piece occurs. One day Charlie impetuously decides to set out on a swim that will certainly result in drowning. He has paddled quite a way when a huge luxury yacht appears, nearly running him down. The occupants peer over the rail: Why, it's dear old Charlie! On board are a group of rich parasites we have already met on dry land, but they're even more intolerably horrible when elegantly afloat. After Charlie is pulled up and offered gourmet hot soup, he decides to swim back to his "faded raspberry farmhouse," where he can make some humble soup of his own. Even his suicide is a failure. Shortly thereafter, however, we find Charlie in the Sahara, wandering across the dunes. What follows might be an intolerable letdown. Then again, there's wisdom to be gained, no matter the outcome. Life may be tawdry, Charlie writes in his final lines, and "it will soon crush me, downloading its scaly mass of triviality into my frail mind, but I am going to go down fighting, fighting for the flash of freedom at the heart of things." Meanwhile, the novel-within-a-novel has ground to a halt as well. "There was nothing left to say about being stuck in Didcot." Be that as it may, this quick-witted and subtly disturbing comedy has a great deal to say about being stuck in life. LAWRENCE OSBORNE'S latest novel, "Hunters in the Dark," will be published in January. 'The unbearable everything ... can all be vaporized on the hot plate of wild indiscretion.'
Library Journal Review
How would you choose to end your days if, like Charlie Fairburn, a successful screenwriter with advanced cirrhosis of the liver, you were given six months to live? Up until now, Charlie has led the life of a bon vivant, lubricated with alcohol and swanning around luxury hotels accompanied by beautiful women. Now he believes he needs to strip down to the essentials to write a novel and leave behind something of value. To accomplish this, he heads to Monte Carlo, intending to gamble away his fortune. There, he finds the alluring -Angelique, who is only too eager to take Charlie's money in exchange for some mutually satisfying sex. Angelique also enables him to get started on his novel, a talky meditation on consciousness, which helps him deal with the predictable mood swings from euphoria to melancholy to grudging acceptance of his fate. VERDICT Highly regarded for his "Patrick Melrose" novels, St. Aubyn delivers memorable characters, dark humor, and sublime writing in this stand-alone effort. [See Prepub Alert, 3/9/15.]-Barbara Love, -formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.