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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good-nosed bird?

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm. One of the pleasures of my life in recent months has been reading the five novels by my guest, Edward St. Auburn. They are books about one family.

The Patrick Melrose novels, the Melrose family. The most recent of the books is published

in hardcover by Faris Strauss and Giroux, but at an incredibly generous bargain.

The first four books, never mind, bad news,

some hope and mother's milk,

have been published by Picador as a paperback original,

all four of them in one book.

Now, since it's some of the very best comic writing being done today, I wanted to ask you,

who are your idols in the world of the comic novel?

I suppose the novelists I've admired aren't all comic, but I was very interested in Joyce and

in Beckett and in Proust, but there are lots of funny bits in Proust.

But I suppose novelists that are predominantly comic, Evelyn Wall,

but much less than those others I've mentioned.

Henry Green, I think, is brilliant, and of course, Nabokov.

Right as his comedy comes out of the effervescence of their style as much as the situations

that they describe. I'm very interested because, you know, I recently got to see some of Dickens' notebooks,

and he crosses out and rewrites constantly.

...