St. Aubyn and Proust

Edward St. Aubyn's novel Mother's Milk, among its many verbally striking and inventive and sometimes hilarious passages, includes the best one-paragraph evocation I've ever seen that captures the essence of Proustian narrative; I'd quote from the book if I had it near me, but essentially it occurs when Patrick Melrose thinks about his past (a past romantic fling I think) and realizes he's not experiencing Time Regained, and then he describes the Proustian qualities he's not achieving - the cobblestones of silver bell that becomes a bridge connecting time past not with time present but with a heightened version of the present, a new sense of time entirely. Obviously Proust is the aspirational model for St. Aubyn, a multi-volume series of novels in which a male protagonist examines the stages of his life, with an odd and uneven selection of events, determined emotionally and not by the conventions or even demands of narrative: Patrick's marriage, for example, is not explained at all. It's no knock on St. Aubyn to say he falls short of the mark - everyone does - but I think he has a tendency to push the humor into satire or even cynicism, which is not where Proust goes at all w/ his material. There's a long sequence in this volume in which Patrick and his best friend, Johnny, now a psychiatrist of all things, discuss Patrick's malaise - a scene that feels very scripted and not an organic, likely conversation between two adult men. Part of this volume, in which Patrick dreams ofhis potential sexual conquests (while ignoring wife and children) reminds me of the famous headline in the Onion: "Source: Barrista is not flirting with you." Despite Patrick's heightened opinion of himself, the women he lusts after are not reciprocating, and he ought to give up on his narcissistic fantasy life and take hold of the life around him, the life slipping through his fingers.