Parallel Lines

Edward St. Aubyn’s Parallel Lines tripped me up with its title. It’s a whisker away from Parallel Lives, the name of a magisterial collective biography by Plutarch and another by Phyllis Rose. In the company of an author as erudite as St. Aubyn, we should assume that this is deliberate. The novel follows the parallel lives of a set of characters, inhabiting the perspectives of the schizophrenic Sebastian; his therapist, Martin; Martin’s adopted daughter, Olivia, who also happens to be Sebastian’s long-lost twin; and the friends and family who surround them. This premise was set up in St. Aubyn’s 2021 novel, Double Blind, for which this forms the second volume in a planned trilogy. But Parallel Lines can be read as a standalone book—and it probably will be, since nowhere on the cover does the publisher advertise the book’s status as a sequel.

Near the beginning of the novel, Olivia muses that the world is “roughly divided between people who felt they were stepping out of solitude into relationships and those who felt they were stepping out of relationships into solitude.” St. Aubyn’s title suggests that his characters sit on the latter side of this divide: if we exist in parallel with one another, our paths remain solitary. But the narrative is ultimately about what happens when lines meet. Less parallel than perpendicular, Olivia and Sebastian’s paths careen unknowingly toward a reunion, despite having been separated since birth.

Olivia and Sebastian (note the Twelfth Night reference) have each sought to reconnect with their “Bio Mum,” Karen, a dysfunctional figure of the type that populated St. Aubyn’s celebrated Patrick Melrose series. Karen stages a clumsy meeting for the twins who, outraged at not having been told about one another’s existence, agree that her behavior is “un-fucking-believable.” The word, as the clever Olivia points out, is an example of timesis, or “splitting up a word with another word.” The book is dotted with similar instances of doubling and division, organized around the central figures of the twins. Wit and wordplay characterize St. Aubyn’s style; indeed, while earnest and important ideas are explored in the book, it is also essentially a performance of the author’s own cleverness.

And St. Aubyn is clever, pulling off a complicated narrative that offers, along the way, a diatribe against Lacanian psychoanalysis, a precis of the current state of brain tumor treatment, and an analysis of Rembrandt’s Self Portrait with Two Circles. If the schizophrenic Sebastian is ill-equipped to handle life, the world is itself, in St. Aubyn’s telling, schizophrenic in its overabundant nature: it overwhelms us (as St. Aubyn’s narrative verges on doing) with possible connections and meanings. The author steers us away from confusion by staging an event at which the characters come together, and where Martin’s relationship to both twins is amusingly revealed. But there’s so much going on—by this point we’ve also met Olivia’s husband, Francis, her best friend, Lucy, who is suffering from a brain tumor, Lucy’s fabulously wealthy husband, Hunter, and an amiable priest—that this climactic section doesn’t quite land.

Despite the bewildering (if admittedly entertaining) digressiveness of the narrative, Parallel Lines succeeds in framing, with sensitivity and elegance, questions such as the nature of family bonds and the obligations we might have to other people. Olivia, considering whether to attempt a relationship with Sebastian, resolves to find out “whether their common origin felt to them more like a fundamental fact or a contingent one.” Her decision to try, and thereby to assert agency in what is otherwise a mess of accident and chance, is moving. It also makes her a foil to Sebastian, who is “easily triggered into a chain reaction of associations.” His mind is, we learn, “crowded with associations only visible to someone with his combinatorial genius.” One can’t help but draw a parallel (yes) with the author who, in thrall to the combinatorial possibilities of the narrative he has created, risks trying to accomplish too much.