The Patrick Melrose novels and Holden Caulfield

Remained impressed by but disappointed in volume 2 of The Patrick Melrose Stories (Bad News) - some very funny lines in an acerbic, British manner and some harrowing descriptions or an upper-class junkie slumming to get his next fix - but unlike the first volume there's no background and no psychological depth: Melrose is a horrible, selfish, self-destructive young man and we get it that he became such a person in large part because of the abuse his father subjected him to - but we see nothing of this evolution, or devolution, of his character: what happened in the intervening 12 years between these two volumes? And no matter how awful his father was, what would lead this young man to become equally nasty and irresponsible? St. Aubyn doesn't examine these central issues; the novel, like the first volume, covers a very short span of time - in this case, a weekend or maybe three days - but unlike volume one it's all written in the foreground - there are no back stories and very few shifts from the POV of Melrose. I can't be the first to note this but it seems that Bad News is to a degree the anti-Catcher in the Rye: two novels about a sad, jaded, sensitive, burned-by-fate young man who travels to NYC and tries to come to terms with his life, by pursuing elusive women, checking in with lost friends, hanging out in clubs, encountering prostitutes, spending way too much money - but the mood could hardly be more different, as there is none of the whimsical sentimentality in Bad News, it's a dark voyage with little or nothing in the way of redemption or growth. Millions of readers have identified with Holden Caulfield but few, I hope, have identified or even sympathized with Melrose. The one redemption is that we know there are (at least) 3 subsequent novels, so he manages in some way to move beyond his addictions and to live some sort of life or half-life.