Lost for Words: A Novel by Edward St. Aubyn Page A

literary success.’
    ‘Sonny has,’ Auntie found herself wanting to say ‘also’, but resisted, ‘written a novel, but I’m afraid it’s been overlooked by the committee – most unfairly.’
    ‘Quite,’ said Sonny. ‘But since there is no interest in representing my work, I will leave you to have lunch together on your own.’
    ‘On the contrary, I had no idea…’ John began, but Sonny turned away too vehemently for him to finish his sentence.
    Overhearing his aunt’s sad reflection that he’d ‘always been oversensitive, even as a little boy’, only added to Sonny’s contempt and fury as he stormed away. Auntie was taking the side of that American agent against her own nephew! Elton hadn’t once mentioned The Mulberry Elephant ; in fact, he behaved as if he had never heard of it! He was too busy sucking up to Auntie, just because she was going to be on the Short List. Sonny had a good mind to get Mansur to finish him off as well, but despite these strong impulses he was too disciplined to lose sight of his primary target.
    He had to admit that part of his outrage over the American had been manufactured so that he could get away and at last discuss with Mansur how to dispose of Malcolm Craig, MP. To maintain his little fiction about an agonizing back pain, Sonny had been carried around a good deal by the turbaned brute over the last five days, but somehow it never seemed to be the right moment to make his special request. Now, with his pride freshly stung by that humiliating lunch, he thought he might finally be ready to cut through the awkwardness of asking a servant to step beyond the strict limits of his job description and assassinate an enemy on his master’s behalf.

 
    20
    Didier watched as coffee trickled from the espresso machine in Katherine’s kitchen into a tiny cup resting on the metal grille beneath. Knowing that the fourth espresso was usually the one to tip him into a frenzy of creativity, he knocked back the bitter little draft while it was still steaming, placed the cup directly in the sink, and returned with relish, and a slightly burnt mouth, to his computer. Katherine was out for the day, giving him the further impetus of solitude.
    He was soon typing rapidly, thrilled by the intelligence and authority of the words rippling onto the screen.

    Nietzsche announced the death of God; Foucault announced the death of Man; the death of Nature announces itself, with no need for an intermediary. As these three elements of our classical discourse dissolve in the acid rain of late Capitalism, we are offered the consolation of its own pale triumvirate: the producer, the consumer and the commodity. Thanks to advertising, the producer sells the commodity to the consumer; thanks to the Internet, the consumer is the commodity sold to the producer. This is the Utopia of borderless democracy: a shift of signifier in the desert of the Real. This is the playground of unlimited freedom: the opportunity to define ourselves through the gratification of an ever more perverse and hybridized fetishism. This is the celebrated openness of a technology that is at the service of perpetual supervision. It is this ‘open’ field that is the supreme disguise: in the absence of the hidden object, we cannot see what we see, because we have abandoned the need to search. As for searching, let our engines do it for us! The thought that cannot think itself is that we will die of thirst before we reach the shining city of individual gratification, which was never made of anything other than the shimmering heat waves of a collectively conditioned desire.
    In the rhetoric of bourgeois liberalism, conformity deploys the language of rebellion, precisely because there is no possibility of revolution. We are at the point in history where it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism. The anxiety once expended on the mutual annihilation of warring political ideologies is now expended on universal