The Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn

If you're a person who (like me) is easily irritated by other people, these are the books for you. What struck me first about these books is the sheer extraordinary nastiness of most of the characters in them. These books are not all created equal, I thought the first three books, Never Mind, Bad News, and Some Hope were much better than Mother's Milk and At Last. I'd say that Bad News (a wild drug trip though seemingly all of English history and culture while cruising the streets of New York City) and Some Hope (a fantastically depressing society party) were by far the best. At their strongest, these books are a perfect cocktail of the hilarious and the terrifying. There's definitely some of Evelyn Waugh's precise, ruthless humour in there (which I mean as a great compliment). I also really loved the characters and how absolutely horrible some of them are. Patrick himself I wound up really liking, his wonderful sense of irony and self-awareness clashes shatteringly with his self-destructive and addictive nature. He's capable of forming extremely strong attachments, which immediately turn into forms of torture, for himself and others. The way these books portray relationships is very astute and powerful. However, I got kind of irritated when they got into long-winded analyses of motive and self and identity and past and philosophy. Those parts were too much like an academic paper. But I really loved the clever use of Shakespeare (mainly The Tempest and King Lear) and the endless witty allusions and games with words and stories. I was really distressed thinking about how much of these books were autobiographical, and apparently the sexually abusive father was. I don't know how much these books are actually Edward St. Aubyn trying to figure out his own life, but I hope for his sake that his life wasn't as awful as Patrick's. A lot of the content is really disturbing, but it never feels gratuitous. I used to think that Trainspotting is the best book about drugs, but these books, especially Bad News, have changed my mind.