I have no idea whether St Aubyn qualifies as “middlebrow” or “highbrow”, or if those terms are even being used non-ironically when they crop up nowadays. Virginia Woolf tried to put up a fence between the two domains and her punishment was to be swallowed by middlebrow culture herself, entombed as another “classic” writer on the same shelves of unread Collected Editions, alongside Jane Austen and Shakespeare. I think he is “serious” or “literary” fiction, a genre marked by dealing with Big Ideas but in a conventional, marketable narrative style. If it fails Woolf’s test for the “pursuit of an idea” then perhaps the ideas being pursued are just too diffuse or elusive for any novelist to catch up with them.

The ideas in Double Blind concern life and death and science and religion and commerce and lots of “debates” that are great fodder for dinner party chat. They have been in St Aubyn’s fictions before. St Aubyn’s novels fall in to 2 groups: the ones with Patrick Melrose, and the ones without. The non-Melrose novels struggle with the absence of the central character St Aubyn knows intimately, since his early life story is clearly based around that of his creator. An upper-middle class English boy who was sexually abused by a father who also treated his wife very badly, as shown in the genteel brutality of Never Mind (1992). Young Patrick was able to progress through public school and Oxford in the late 70s but his psychic traumas brought him in to drug addiction and the exhilarating ride around New York in the early 80s that takes up Bad News (also 1992). The bad news of that story was that the old monster had died and young Patrick would have to make something of himself in a world he was absent from. Some Hope (1994) shows him finally off the drugs, getting through law school and finally settling in to the privileged career and life that was available all along, even without the detour through narcotic oblivion.