Ian Parker profiles Edward St. Aubyn in this week’s issue of the New Yorker, delving into the “family disaster” that shaped much of the writer’s fiction:

… [he] recalled some of his life’s most fraught experiences with steady irony, and in an unhurried English privilege that—like the paintings that hang in his drawing room, and the tone of amused contempt that sometimes marks his prose—is part of his inheritance from a father who tortured him.