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A Clue to the Exit

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A Clue to the Exit

Paperback(Reprint)

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Paperback(Reprint)
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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.

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About the Author

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.

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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

06/15/2015
Linguistic legerdemain enlivens this short, sharp, often funny, occasionally moving novel about a British screenwriter who, when told he has six months to live, sets about writing a novel. Best known for the movie Aliens with a Human Heart, Charlie finds himself in his final days alienated from his ex-wife (who keeps their London house even though her spiritual home is Tibet), his New York agent, and his friends. Moreover, throughout his travels, he is too restless to stay in his house in St. Tropez, or a luxury Monte Carlo hotel, or Toulon’s red light district, or the desert, holding fast to two obsessions: longing to reconnect with his daughter and a determination to write something important. Interspersed with Charlie’s personal narrative are excerpts from his novel, a third-person description of people meeting on a train after a conference on consciousness. Cross-references abound: the hero of Charlie’s novel is named Patrick (a nod to St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose series), fellow travellers Crystal and Peter (in the novel within the novel) appeared in St. Aubyn’s novel, On the Edge, and Charlie’s novel’s tentative title is On the Train. Both novels provide laugh-out-loud moments, as St. Aubyn remains the preeminent satirist of a meaningless New Age search for meaning. What makes this effort compelling is Charlie’s painfully honest, unremittingly self-aware account of his emotional journey, drawing readers down with him into a “narrowing funnel of time.” (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

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

09/01/2015
How would you choose to end your days if, like Charlie Fairburn, a successful screenwriter with advanced cirrhosis of the liver, you were given six months to live? Up until now, Charlie has led the life of a bon vivant, lubricated with alcohol and swanning around luxury hotels accompanied by beautiful women. Now he believes he needs to strip down to the essentials to write a novel and leave behind something of value. To accomplish this, he heads to Monte Carlo, intending to gamble away his fortune. There, he finds the alluring Angelique, who is only too eager to take Charlie's money in exchange for some mutually satisfying sex. Angelique also enables him to get started on his novel, a talky meditation on consciousness, which helps him deal with the predictable mood swings from euphoria to melancholy to grudging acceptance of his fate. VERDICT Highly regarded for his "Patrick Melrose" novels, St. Aubyn delivers memorable characters, dark humor, and sublime writing in this stand-alone effort. [See Prepub Alert, 3/9/15.]—Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

Library Journal

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.

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