Another twist in the Patrick Melrose cycle

The Patrick Melrose cycle goes off on yet another new direction in volume 4, Mother's Milk, which is centered not on Patrick but on his son, Robert: this time we get a five-year gap, we're now in the year 2000, last we saw Patrick it was at the tail end of a mean-spirited and spiteful over-the-top birthday party when for some reason he decides to try to give up his hatred and bitterness toward his parents - and 5 years later lo and behold he seems to have done so. He's now married and a father; every moment of perception of him, however, is from the POV of the insanely precocious child; the story begins in fact with Robert's account, Shandy-like, of his own birth. I have to say St. Aubyn has an astonishing capacity to see things from the smart child's point of view - unmatched, actually, in my reading experience. This novel moves forward through about 5 years to birth of 2nd son, Thomas, and much of it involves Robert's attempts to see things as Thomas does: for the first time, with no context for anything. This attempt is almost a philosophical exercise - really stretches our idea of what consciousness and perception are or may be to different people. Yet this wouldn't be a St. Aubyn novel if it didn't include despicable people, and much of the first part of this volume involves a visit to the family of one of Robert's schoolmates (Robert actually like the kid), a bunch of spoiled and vapid nouveaux riches, for whom Patrick expresses appropriate contempt. It's Patrick who's evolved, as I'd hoped he might, though his evolution feels imposed from without (by the author) rather than developed or explained: he's much wiser and more sympathetic now, not drawn to the trappings of wealth and status and not just bitterly cynical from the outside but trying, it seems to raise his boys and be a good husband. We know so little about him, however - we don't even know whom he's married or how that came about. Maybe some of the background will emerge in the later sections of this volume.