A Year in Reading: Alix Ohlin

December 17, 2012 | 4 books mentioned 1

cover2012 was the year of Edward St. Aubyn for me. I started reading his Patrick Melrose novels (the first four of which were published in a collected edition by Picador in January) and couldn’t stop. The series follows Patrick from his privileged, abusive childhood in France through a drug-saturated trip into the abyss in New York City to his first faltering steps towards adulthood in England. The prose is brutal, elegant, acidly funny. No one is spared — not Patrick’s selfish, weak-willed parents, not even his pitiful childhood self. Although the novels sketch a corrosive portrait of life among England’s upper class, the affections and failures they present also feel universal. I don’t think I’ve ever read books so utterly lacking in sentiment, and yet so completely heartbreaking.

covercoverOther books I read and enjoyed this year include Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine, a caustic, unrelenting look at failure, featuring an ill-fated parrot; Kevin Young’s wide-ranging, beautifully written book of cultural criticism, The Grey Album; Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, as fresh and funny on American expat life in Paris as it must have been when it was first published in 1958; and Doppler, a brief sort-of-comic parable by the Norwegian writer Erlend Loe, about a man who, after getting hit on the head, decides to live in the woods and hang out with a moose named Bongo.

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is the author of five books, most recently Dual Citizens. Her novel Inside was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Walrus, Best American Short Stories, on public radio’s “Selected Shorts,” and many other places.