When St. Aubyn is at his best

We begin to see the deep fissures in the personality of Patrick Melrose in volume 4 of the cycle, Mother's Milk: while at first he seemed to have turned his life around and become a successful attorney and a good father and husband, as we move into his point of view we see, first, that he's still addicted to drugs, no longer illegal narcotics and opiates but now legit prescription rx to help him sleep and wake; we also see that he's perfectly willing to have an affair of convenience, essentially right under the nose of his wife and kids (5-year-old Robert almost catches him in the act), only because he's "lonely" and feels his wife has abandoned him and given all her attention to their newborn, Thomas. Poor Patrick - first guy in history to have a mid-life crisis I guess. Two things remain completely unexplained: who is his wife, the nondescript Mary, and how did they manage to get together and what is she like, what is she about? And, who's this Julia, former girlfriend of Patrick's now apparently living with them for no clear reason - she's dynamite waiting to explode the world around her. I guess we have to accept that Patrick is a lawyer, perhaps even a criminal defense lawyer, although he in no way seems to have a legal mind of much of occupation for that matter - perhaps that's the British indifferent attitude toward careerism, esp among the upper crust. What we do see is that Patrick on the one hand is contemptuous of his older relatives for bemoaning the loss of the family fortune while he himself obsesses about the loss of his much smaller fortune, as embodied in his mother's house and grounds that she's planning to give to a swindler of a charity. Well, I can't blame him for being troubled by the loss of his inheritance, but on the other hand you have to wonder: what has he done in his life to deserve the riches that have come his way and that he has squandered? What has he done in life in any way to make the world a better place for anyone? St. Aubyn is using Patrick as a lance with which to skewer his class, quite effectively, but this series as at its best when St. Aubyn gives us a double-vision: loathing Patrick, yet laughing at his witticisms, joining him in his contempt for his targets, and sympathizing with him for his great suffering. That doesn't happen all the time, but when it does these novels are powerful.