Edward at Esalen

As a big fan of St. Aubyn’s five Patrick Melrose novels, I wondered what else he’d written, so I picked up On The Edge (1998, in the middle of the Melrose books).  It’s a comic novel of a young disenchanted Brit who is trying to track to a German woman with whom he had a three-day love affair. His search lands him at a New Age institute at Esalen.  The satire of guru California from the point of view of a staid Brit is funny and often telling, but here St. Aubyn doesn’t achieve the same level of costly autobiographical insight that permeates the Melrose books.  Rather this is a more traditional comic satire.  In that I was a bit disappointed. 

This passage sums up the Brit’s take on New Age America:

Peter wanted to ask Crystal to sit with him, but in the communal dining room he felt the usual sense of personal and social meltdown known locally as ‘lodge psychosis’. Instead of the sense of community it was designed to promote, the lodge shipwrecked its occupants by presenting them with a series of treacherous whirlpools and rock dilemmas. Acquaintances imagined they were friends, friends turned into strangers, seminarians were looked down on by residents, and residents exploited by staff, teachers appeared to be available to students but were suddenly ringed by jealous lovers and competitive sidekicks. Anyone at any time could come and ‘process an issue’ with you, however turgid or trivial, whether you could remember meeting them before or not. The person to whom you told the secret of your mother’s mental illness the night before might not remember your name by lunchtime the next day. The permissiveness that made sex seem pleasingly inevitable made you realize more sharply the internal constraints that prevented you from approaching the object of desire, but the same permissiveness could not stop the bore you most dreaded from bearing down on you with greedy tactlessness when you were deeply engaged with someone else. Like the place as a whole, the lodge made a partial transcendence of the formalities and hypocrisies of ordinary social life, but at the same time generated a longing for the good manners and the privacy which those formalities, until they became corrupted, were designed to protect.

Or on a more positive note:

Esalen

These Buddhists were certainly on to something. The exhausting business of turning his colliding and scattered emotions into a story about who he was was matched by the exhausting business of editing it into a story he liked. The first thing he asked about a situations was whether he liked it or not, and the next question was how it would ‘turn out’, which meant whether he would like it or not later on.

The plot is thin and the characters shallow, but there’s fun to be had.  Peter does find the German woman he was looking for, but when he does no longer desires her.  He has been changed by his Esalen experience, and at the end we have some hope that he will achieve better balance in his life.  Or maybe he’ll just careen in a different direction next time.

I miss the bitterness and painful sincerity of the Melrose books.  I’ll have to reread them.