Summary

In Smith’s sixth Harper’s column, “A St. Aubyn Summer,” Smith explains her choice for the summer: “At Last” by Edward St. Aubyn, the last of the Patrick Melrose Trilogy, a tragic history of the Melroses, an aristocratic and deeply dysfunctional family. She notes that unlike the “tidal wave of poshness” (302) sweeping the U.K., St. Aubyn is trying to bury the aristocracy, not restore it. She praises St. Aubyn’s ear for dialogue. In “On Island Life and Mother Love,” the seventh Harper’s column, Smith analyzes Ian Thomson’s The Dead Yard: A Story of Modern Jamaica. While his portrait of Jamaica is bleak, and full of instances of colorism and poverty, there are glimmers of hope in a number of self-sufficient, thriving communities there...