Patrick Melrose: Get a life!

At last near the end of Edward St. Aubyn's Mother's Milk, the 4th volume in the Patrick Melrose cycle, we get to know a little bit about Mary, Patrick's wife, who had hardly any characteristics or background story whatsoever up to this point. What we learn: she's yet another offspring of distant and difficult parents, suffered through childhood, extremely shy, not clear at all how she got together w/ Patrick but it is clear that he's a disappointment to her class-conscious, money-obsessed family - her only role in life, they would think, is to race to social status and wealth of her family. What's with these people? I used to jokingly opine that the English adore their dogs and ignore their kids - and these novels would confirm that statement, at least among the "uppers" (there are no significant characters in these novels other than the wealthy and the aristocrats). But this generation is breaking the mold, it seems: Mary is a very devoted mother, esp to younger son, Thomas, yet her devotion to Thomas has driven Patrick away, as they live together but have no intimate or even friendly relationship. How different is this from the family life that Patrick has spent his whole life trying not to replicate? In one of the final sections of the novel, Patrick again obsesses about his mother's giving away of the family house in France, and bickering bitterly and aggressively with Seamus, the faker to whom she's given her property. It would all be more poignant, I guess, if we sympathized in the least with Patrick's despair - but why should we? He's a nasty guy, and still extremely comfortable by most standards, and though his personality was formed by his diabolical father it's hard not to think that he's getting what he deserved. Final passage I read last night has him visiting mother in nursing home and she asks him to kill her. Quite coldly he says he'd like to but it's against the law. Ok, he is pretty funny. But please - grow up and, as we Americans say, "get a life."