A Clue to the Exit

by Edward St. Aubyn

Overview

A beautifully modulated novel that shows Edward St. Aubyn at his sparkling best

Charlie Fairburn, successful screenwriter, ex-husband, and absent father, has been given six months to live. He resolves to stake half his fortune on a couple of turns of the roulette wheel and, to his agent's disgust, to write a novel-about death. In the casino he meets his muse. Charlie grows as addicted to writing fiction as she is to gambling.

His novel is set on a train and involves a group of characters (familiar to readers of St. Aubyn's earlier work) who are locked in a debate about the nature of consciousness. As this train gets stuck at Didcot, and Charlie gets more passionately entangled with the dangerous Angelique, A Clue to the Exit comes to its startling climax. Exquisitely crafted, witty, and thoughtful, Edward St. Aubyn's dazzling novel probes the very heart of being.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250046031
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	09/01/2015
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

EDWARD ST. AUBYN was born in London in 1960. He is the author of Lost for Words, On the Edge and The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mothers Milk. His final Patrick Melrose novel is the standalone At Last. Mother's Milk was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Editorial Reviews

…any excuse will do to spend some time with [St. Aubyn's] wicked humor and his sentences, some of the best in the language.

The New York Times - John Williams

…[a] sparkling and morbid confession of a novel…In lesser—or even just other—hands, this fragile comic gambit would soon run out of steam. That it doesn't do so is owing to two cardinal virtues: the brevity and the unslacking tension within Edward St. Aubyn's prose. There's a third virtue too, though it's trickier: a controlled, manic excess that brings to the surface the central character's simmering madness…this quick-witted and subtly disturbing comedy has a great deal to say about being stuck in life.

The New York Times Book Review - Lawrence Osborne

St. Aubyn delivers memorable characters, dark humor, and sublime writing in this stand-alone effort.” —Library Journal

“One of the great comic writers of our time.” —The New York Times Review of Books

“Perhaps the most brilliant English novelist of his generation.” —Alan Hollinghurst

“One of the preeminent writers of his generation.” —Will Self

“One of the great prose stylists in England” —Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones

“St. Aubyn is utterly fearless.” —Lev Grossman, Time

From the Publisher

2015-05-06
If you can see the end coming from a long way off, do you rush toward it or head in the opposite direction? Therein lies a question to be wrestled with—and so St. Aubyn (On the Edge, 2014, etc.) does. Charlie Fairburn, the screenwriter of such immortal flicks as Aliens with a Human Heart ("perhaps you were one of the fifty-three million people who paid to see it"), has six months to live. Does he head out to sail around the world, climb great peaks, see the most important museums in the most beautiful cities? Nope. Now that he's put aside the possibility of killing himself for a minute or two, Charlie nurses ambitions that are somewhat less involved: he decides he's going to write the novel he dreamed about when he was young, explore the ideas that captivated him in college. Never mind that his agent will go ballistic: there are ways of working around Arnie Cornfield, whose name and manner are clichés as much as are his words, even if St. Aubyn doesn't quite have American English, and especially Hollywood American English, down. ("The audience have gotta leave the movie with a smile on their faces," he writes, Britishly.) Prozac and potage in tummy, Charlie sets to work, penning a yarn that reeks of Waiting for Godot and undergraduate courses in the nature of consciousness and suchlike things: "She hardly recognized the argumentative intellectual she had driven to psychedelic insanity in the Utah desert five years ago, the man who declared the ‘scandal' of pure Being, and ‘announced the death of Nature.' " Charlie's slim novel is and will always be an acquired taste, but it makes a nice distraction while he's waiting for the end. But did someone say deus ex machina? St. Aubyn turns in a curious confection, well-crafted as always but rather insubstantial for all its philosophical explorations; it's certainly more cheerful than his Melrose novels (At Last, 2012, etc.), but even though it's still brimming with mordant humor and venom (and, for that matter, plenty of inside jokes to please faithful readers), it seems a detour from the weightier, psychologically richer stuff of old. Though with plenty of good moments, this ranks as lesser work by an author who's done much better.

Kirkus Reviews