If you haven’t been following the saga of Patrick Melrose, don’t start here. Go back to Never Mind, the first of Edward St. Aubyn’s five-novel cycle about Patrick, the scion of a wealthy and dissipated English family, rendered by St. Aubyn with scathing humor and pitiless realism. Abused by his father and neglected by his mother, Patrick grows up ravaged both by financial riches and emotional poverty, and as an adult he struggles with drugs, alcohol and his own fecklessness. His sense of humor, however, is unimpaired, and he never stops trying to make peace with his legacy and find his way to some semblance of happiness and mental health.