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"Don't take Bogut first!" and 29 other thoughts about the NBA draft.

One thought for each pick in Tuesday night’s NBA draft, which adds up to 29 more thoughts than I have on a normal Tuesday night.

1. OK, Milwaukee Bucks, you’re on the clock. Don’t take Andrew Bogut. Don’t do it. Yes, he’s a big man. Centers are rare. Everyone says you should take him. Don’t take him.

Listen to Mike Tirico on ESPN. Really. I never say this. Listen to Mike Tirico. He just pointed out that the last time a team had the No. 1 overall pick and no coach on draft night, which is the situation you’re in, it was the Clippers, and they picked Michael Olowokandi.

You remember Michael Olowokandi, don’t you? Center. People were talking about him all that previous season as a surefire No. 1? Well, not everyone. Not me. I said don’t take him. The Clippers took him.

He was a stiff. He was a robo-stiff. In Latin he would be called “stiffia majora.” If he were a president he would be Stiffraham Lincoln.

Don’t take Andrew Bogut. You’ll be sorry. You won’t be as sorry as the Clippers were but it’s hard to be as sorry as the Clippers. Bogut will probably be fine. He’ll score some, make some nice passes. He’ll get worked on the defensive end. He’s no overall No. 1.

Oh. They took him. Milwaukee Bucks: Andrew Bogut, C, Utah.

2. Atlanta Hawks: Marvin Williams, F, North Carolina
It seems like the Hawks have been miserable for 100 years, doesn’t it? It has been a long time, six straight losing seasons, the best of which was 2002-03, when they went 35-47.

Six years isn’t that long, really, but it’s long enough so that the next time the Hawks are even decent, flirting with .500, it’s going to seem weird.

Someday in the not-too-distant future, Bucks fans aren’t going to want to talk about this draft.

3. Utah Jazz (from Portland): Deron Williams, G, Illinois
The Jazz trade up to get the point guard who led Illinois to the National Championship Game this year. They give the Trail Blazers the sixth and 27th picks, plus a conditional future first-rounder.

Dick Vitale just got done saying the Hawks will regret not taking Chris Paul of Wake Forest rather than Marvin Williams. I presume he thinks the same about the Jazz, since Deron Williams plays Paul’s position. The Hawks need a point guard, but Williams vs. Paul is kind of a toss-up. Either one could end up being better. They’re both very good. But I think Vitale’s wrong about Paul vs. Marvin Williams.

4. New Orleans Hornets: Chris Paul, G, Wake Forest:
I wonder where Paul and the Hornets will be playing in a few years.

5. Charlotte Bobcats: Raymond Felton, G, North Carolina:
Wow. Felton jumps way up because the Bobcats need a point guard and Williams and Paul are gone. I’m a fan of Felton’s. I think he’s going to be a good player someday.

I don’t know, though. The Bobcats need so much. It’s not like they’re going to be contending for a title right away. Point guards are out there. I think I’d have looked for some front-court help for Emeka Okafor rather than reaching for Felton. On the other hand, he’s a North Carolina kid who led the Tar Heels to the NCAA title, so he’ll sell some tickets.

I have a hunch Felton’s going to take a while to find his NBA game.

6. Portland Trail Blazers (from Utah): Martell Webster, G, high school
It’s a whole new era here, isn’t it? Five straight college boys at the top of the draft before the first high schooler goes.

Of course, the new 19-year-old minimum age, which doesn’t go into effect until next year, will be remembered as the thing that got NBA teams to stop drafting high school kids so high.

Whoa, Grandma’s wearing a crazy church hat. It looks like a chef’s hat that’s melting.

7. Toronto Raptors: Charlie Villanueva, F, Connecticut
Another guy moving way up from his spot in all those mock drafts. The talking heads on ESPN are just beside themselves with how shocking this pick is, given the players still on the board. “Sean May! Are you kidding me?” says Vitale.

Villanueva has size and athletic ability, but didn’t dominate in college the way you’d think he ought to have done. The book on Villanueva is he doesn’t work hard enough. I suppose that could change.

8. New York Knicks: Channing Frye, C, Arizona
Another college kid, seven out of eight. Good thing they have that minimum age now.

The draft is once again being held in New York City, boringly, though that does mean we get to be entertained by the annual ritual of Knicks fans booing their team’s pick. Relatively speaking, Frye seems to be pretty popular.

Frye also didn’t dominate in college the way he should have. He’ll go to the Knicks and, you know, lose.

9. Golden State Warriors: Ike Diogu, F, Arizona State
Diogu’s stock has been rising lately, but the Warriors really seemed to reach here. I don’t think Diogu is big enough to take his in-the-paint game to the NBA. He’ll be a role player, a rebounder off the bench, another Warriors pick who didn’t perform up to his spot in the draft.

10. Los Angeles Lakers: Andrew Bynum, C, high school
A 7-foot high schooler from New Jersey. Bynum’s not even 18 yet. Mr. Bynum, meet the 12th chair on the Lakers bench, where you’ll be for the next few years.

11. Orlando Magic: Fran Vazquez, F, Spain
The good thing about having Stuart Scott do this gig is that the players he’s interviewing aren’t huge stars yet, so the jock-sniffing is kept to a minimum. All the better when there’s a translator involved.

12. Los Angeles Clippers: Yaroslav Korolev, C, Russia
I don’t know anything about this 18-year-old, and I know this already: He’s a better pick than Michael Olowokandi was.

13. Charlotte Bobcats: Sean May, F, North Carolina
Very interesting. I guess the Bobcats can’t resist May as long as he’s still available at No. 13. He’s got an NBA-ready body, big-game experience and enough skills and smarts to be a solid player in the league. Maybe more important, he’s another Tar Heel for Charlotte.

I think I’d have gone with either Hakim Warrick or Danny Granger here, but I don’t have to sell tickets.

14. Minnesota Timberwolves: Rashad McCants, G, North Carolina
The 14th pick is the last lottery pick, and four of them are members of this year’s NCAA champion North Carolina team.

Why was David Stern still standing at the podium when McCants got to the stage? McCants had to tap him on the shoulder. Yo, commish.

Where’s Gerald Green?

15. New Jersey Nets: Antoine Wright, G, Texas A&M
Big-time scorer, a small forward who was pretty much the whole show at A&M.

16. Toronto Raptors (from Philadelphia via Denver, New Jersey): Joey Graham, F, Oklahoma State
Graham’s not in the hall? An athletic star on a very visible college team for the last few years. I’d have invited him.

17. Indiana Pacers: Danny Granger, F, New Mexico
Dick Vitale line of the night: “I know one guy that knows talent, and that’s Larry Bird and Donnie Walsh at Indiana.”

18. Boston Celtics: Gerald Green, F, high school
Not quite a LeBron James white suit. Light gray. The suits haven’t been very interesting. Green was a top 10 pick in a lot of mock drafts.

19. Memphis Grizzles: Hakim Warrick, F, Syracuse
I think Warrick’s going to be a very good pro player. I was afraid the Warriors were going to pick him, which would have meant I was wrong, he’s not going to be a good pro player. Now I’m hoping the Grizzlies pick him, which means Jerry West thinks he’s going to be a good pro player.

Yay.

20. Denver Nuggets (from Washington via Orlando): Julius Hodge, G, North Carolina State
Ooh, really almost a white suit. Damn, this show is missing Charles Barkley.

21. Phoenix Suns (from Chicago): Nate Robinson, G, Washington
Makes sense. These guys need a point guard bad. The rumor is Robinson will be traded to the Knicks with Quentin Richardson for Kurt Thomas. Too bad. A Robinson-Steve Nash backcourt would be fun, and you know Suns coach Mike D’Antoni would put them both in there at the same time at least a little bit, just ’cause he’d want to see it.

22. Denver Nuggets: Jarrett Jack, G, Georgia Tech
This guy’s better than a 22 pick, I think, but ESPN’s reporting that the Nuggets might flip him for a pair of later picks. (This later happens.)

23: Sacramento Kings: Francisco Garcia, G, Louisville
Garcia can play if he doesn’t get beat up. He’s Brent Barry, more or less.

24. Houston Rockets: Luther Head, G, Illinois
For much of their time together in the Illinois backcourt, Head, not Deron Williams, was considered by many to be the better pro prospect. I never understood that. I don’t see Head doing a lot in the NBA.

25. Seattle Sonics: Johan Petro, C, France
Gosh, European basketball is ugly. Between the uniforms and the trapezoidal key, it’s just an eyesore.

Petro is the third player to walk onstage and shake hands with Stern since ESPN made a big deal of Warrick being the last player in the room. Warrick was just the last invited player. Others made their own way there. The non-invited players don’t get to sit down with Stuart Scott. No great loss there.

26. Detroit Pistons: Jason Maxiell, F, Cincinnati
If I’m the Pistons, I take Salim Stoudamire here. The Pistons could use a backcourt shooter coming off the bench. I was never terribly impressed with Maxiell at Cincinnati. I know he fits the Pistons’ tough, overachieving M.O., but I don’t have a good feeling about this pick.

27. Portland Trail Blazers (from Dallas via Utah): Linas Kleiza, F, Missouri
It never ceases to amaze me how, with all of the basketball being played, high school and college ball, international ball, the world cannot annually spit out 30 players who are obviously ready for the NBA. That’s how good the NBA is.

We’re at the 27th pick, and we’re already at total hit-or-miss guys and have been for a while.

The Blazers trade Kleiza and second-round choice Ricky Sanchez to Denver for Jarrett Jack.

28. San Antonio Spurs: Ian Mahinmi, F, France
At this point in the draft, you’re just trying to get lucky, to find a surprise, a Tony Parker or even a Beno Udrih. The Spurs, clearly, are very good at this sort of thing.

I don’t want to doubt San Antonio’s ability to find international gems — Manu Ginobili with the 57th pick, anyone? — but who the heck is Ian Mahinmi? Where’s Wayne Simien?

29. Miami Heat: Wayne Simien, F, Kansas
Oh, there he is. If he can stay healthy, which has been a big if for him, he should be able to help right away.

30. New York Knicks (from Phoenix via San Antonio): David Lee, F, Florida
That’s more like it. Knicks fans are booing lustily.

Previous column: Elderly NBA vets seek pensions

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The CNN host speaks on the "frightening" Iranian threat in ways that have to be seen to be believed

VIDEO

By Glenn Greenwald

I’m finishing up a long investigative article that will be posted later this morning, but I just could not let go unnoted this commentary on The Iranian Threat by CNN’s Erin Burnett (“frightening,” she observed). I barely know what to say about it — the critiques of media fear-mongering I wrote the last two days apply in spades to this — but it really just mocks itself. It’s the sort of thing you would produce if you set out to create a mean-spirited parody of mindless, war-hungry, fear-mongering media stars, but you wouldn’t dare go this far because you’d want the parody to have a feel of realism to it, and this would be way too extreme to be believable. She really hauled it all out: WMDs! Terrorist sleeper cells in the U.S. controlled by Tehran! Iran’s long-range nuclear missiles reaching our homeland!!!! She almost made the anti-Muslim war-mongering fanatic she brought on to interview, Rep. Peter King, appear sober and reasonable by comparison.

: Follow Glenn Greenwald on Twitter: @ggreenwald. More Glenn Greenwald

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Two Parsons professors discuss their best students' work and their favorite classic color theorists

By Jude Stewart, Imprint

Bezold Effect study (Credit: Liz Marshall)

Topics:Imprint, Design

This article originally appeared on Imprint.

Welcome back to an ongoing, freewheeling conversation on color with Thomas Bosket and Langdon Graves, who both teach color theory at Parsons the New School for Design. (Read part 1 to catch up.)

Do you have any knockout students in your color theory classes right now?

Thomas Bosket: I haven’t taught color this past year, so here are some students from previous years: one work by Liz Marshall exhibited the Bezold effect and the economic use of color. [Ed note: the Bezold effect is an optical illusion in which two colors, juxtaposed in small doses, distort the impression of each color’s shade, just by proximity to another hue.] The other, by Stephanie Luk, offers a redesign of Parsons’ very narrow hallways.

Bezold Effect study by Liz Marshall

Colour of Space assignment for Parsons’ narrow hallways, by Stephanie Luk

Langdon Graves: I had a terrific class last fall because of how dedicated the students were. Early each semester, I assign a Creative Color Chart — a spin on the traditional color wheel — for which the students create their own progressive designs featuring 12 hues, tints and shades. One student, Christine Gurtler, designed a chart inspired by the grid of a bird’s-eye view of Manhattan:

That’s all acrylic paint and paper. Obviously, she went beyond 12.

Two semesters ago I gave the assignment to design an infographic to represent a personal experience, using color in a significant way. A student named Vaishnavi Mahendran charted the progression of her taste in music and fashion from childhood to adulthood, assigning an increasingly darker, more sophisticated hue of pink to each phase of her life (interrupted by an amusing black/metal phase). It’s such a clever and attractive design, I love sharing it:

Detail from infographic by Vaishnavi Mahendran

Lightning-round: Whom would you rather have as a roomie on a desert island, Josef Albers or Johannes Itten? [Note: both men are Bauhaus artists noted for their contributions to “classic” color theory.]

From Homage to the Square color-interaction series, by Josef Albers

TB: Itten. He was trying to understand color and contextualize it. Albers feels too esoteric (in an uninteresting and exclusive manner — we have history, Albers and I … grad school!) and his work has been turned into “rules,” no fault of his, but I could just see hours and hours of argument about the color of the sunsets.

Horizontal Vertical, by Johannes Itten

LG: I know I should say Itten because he was such a master and without him, we certainly wouldn’t have as much to learn from Albers. But I think I would choose Albers because of how much he attributed his appreciation for color to his experiences with his students.

This is how I continue to learn about color, myself: by interacting with other people and learning as much from them as they do from me. I also like the thought of sitting around on a desert island with Albers, creating simultaneous contrast collages of found mango leaves.

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2012.

Salon is proud to feature content from Imprint, the fastest-growing design community on the web. Brought to you by Print magazine, America’s oldest and most trusted design voice, Imprint features some of the biggest names in the industry covering visual culture from every angle. Imprint advances and expands the design conversation, providing fresh daily content to the community (and now to salon.com!), sparking conversation, competition, criticism, and passion among its members.

: More Jude Stewart

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She used to find it hard to climax, but suddenly, inexplicably, it became quick and easy. What happened?

By Tracy Clark-Flory

(Credit: iStockphoto/pascalgenest)

Topics:Salon -- After Dark, Am I Normal?

For the longest time, I found it really difficult to orgasm. Even with the most sensitive partner, it would often take a long while, if at all. I would often resort to faking it because I was taking too long. Even while masturbating, it sometimes took me up to an hour, despite being really turned on.

Then I started seeing someone new, stopped faking orgasms and tried to worry less. I started coming, and it became easier and more reliable. Now it happens every time, sometimes multiple times. While masturbating, I can orgasm within seconds, which was never, ever possible before. What’s going on here?

“I wish I knew.” That’s Barry Komisaruk’s matter-of-fact answer, and he’s the leading expert on the science behind the female orgasm.

His lab at Rutgers University was the first to produce a video of the brain during climax in women — just last November. “We’re in the embryonic stage of understanding,” he says. “It’s not even in its infancy.” That’s in large part because it’s tremendously difficult to get funding for sex research — but that’s a story for another day (and you can bet I will be telling it someday soon).

Komisaruk, whom I’ve interviewed before, and his team have made huge strides, but still, he says nobody fully understands the mechanism at work here. Just to give a sense of the range of scenarios, Komisaruk explains, “What about people who used to have orgasms but now they’re on antidepressants or antipsychotics and they no longer can have orgasms? The blockage could occur in a part of the brain that’s different from people who, say, have had a traumatic psychological event like sexual abuse and no longer can have an orgasm.” There is no one thing that makes it difficult, or impossible, for women to orgasm.

It’s not unusual for a new partner to come with a change in your orgasmic experience. Recently, a woman who had never orgasmed called Komisaruk and volunteered to do a brain scan for his research. “I set it up and then a couple days before the scan was scheduled, she called me up and said she just got a new boyfriend and she had her first orgasm,” he says. “So, bummer — for me, not for her!”

What’s most interesting in your case, is that your experience of orgasm even during masturbation changed profoundly and, it sounds like, without a dramatic adjustment in technique. “It seems like it’s more of a psychological factor,” he says. “If somebody can suddenly start having orgasms, there could be attitudinal changes. It seems more likely that it would be an attitudinal change rather than a physiological change.” There’s also the annoying irony of getting what you want when you stop trying.

An important part of what’s going on here is that by no longer preempting your orgasm with fakes one, you were able to begin experiencing legitimate climaxes with your partner. I asked Komisaruk if it’s possible that you experienced a snowball effect: The more orgasms you had, the easier it became to come in the first place. In my supreme scientific in-expertise, I suggested: Maybe she, like, burnt new neural pathways? He responded: “We don’t really know; it’s possible.”

You see, there are many possible explanations. What’s important is that you’ve got ahold of your orgasm. Enjoy it, treat it well and don’t let it go!

: Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter. More Tracy Clark-Flory

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Pick of the week: Inside the creepy groupthink of the Russian president's proto-fascist youth movement

By Andrew O'Hehir

Topics:Our Picks, Our Picks: Movies, Documentaries, Russia

Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president turned prime minister (turned president again, probably) likes to say that his country has developed a “special democracy” or “sovereign democracy” in the 21st century. As an opposition politician observes in Danish director Lise Birk Pedersen’s film “Putin’s Kiss,” that’s a little like a store owner claiming to sell somewhat fresh fish. It either is or it isn’t, and Russia’s version of democracy doesn’t pass the smell test. (Please note, foreign readers, that I’m not holding my own country’s political system up as some shining example. But it’s still true that I can write what I want to about Obama or Romney or anybody else without being beaten half to death.)

For anyone eager to understand Russia’s depressing 20-year slide from one version of cynical totalitarianism into another, with a brief stop-off in between for giddy, wide-open, largely dysfunctional democracy, “Putin’s Kiss” is required viewing. Of course Pedersen can’t explain all the conundrums of contemporary Russia in 85 minutes, but in profiling two singularly important young Russians — pro-Putin youth activist Masha Drokova and leading opposition journalist Oleg Kashin — she captures some essential drama in the nation’s recent political life. (If you read Russian, Kashin’s site is here.)

Born at the tail end of the Soviet era, Drokova was a fresh-faced teenage girl from suburban Moscow when she suddenly became famous in the mid-2000s after giving Putin a worshipful smooch on national TV. She assured interviewers that she could tell he was a strong, charismatic and kind man, and that whomever she spent her life with would have to follow his example. Poised and pleasant, pretty without being drop-dead Natasha gorgeous, Drokova rapidly became a major public face of Nashi, the “anti-fascist and democratic” youth organization founded by prominent Putin supporters to channel adolescent energy and quell dissent.

As opposition leader Ilya Yashin tells Pedersen, Putin’s regime grew increasingly restless and paranoid after the 2005 “Orange Revolution” threw the post-Soviet autocrats out of power in neighboring Ukraine. (Arguably, the Orange Revolution has itself been largely undone by current Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, but that’s another story.) Nashi was initially led by shadowy Putin lieutenant Vasily Yakemenko, perhaps operating at the behest of Vladislav Surkov, a guy who seems like a boring, puffy-faced Kremlin apparatchik but is widely described as the “gray cardinal” or ideological puppet-master behind Putin’s regime. (At the risk of derailing this whole review, the more you read about Surkov the weirder he gets. He may have written or co-written a satirical novel making fun of the system he helped create, and reportedly has portraits of Che Guevara and Tupac Shakur, alongside Putin, in his Kremlin office.)

As we see from Pedersen’s often chilling footage inside Nashi rallies and summer camps, Surkov and Yakemenko created a two-faced organization on a familiar and unfortunate 20th-century model, one part calisthenics and canoeing classes and ritualized teen romance, one part ultra-nationalist ideology. Older Russians of course liken it to the Soviet-era Komsomol, by all accounts one of the communist state’s more successful endeavors. Other people have simply started calling it the “Putinjugend” (a reference to the German name of the Hitler Youth). At any rate, saying that the group is pro-democratic and anti-fascist doesn’t make it so; Nashi has frequently been used to humiliate and harass opposition politicians, journalists and human-rights activists, and is at least circumstantially connected to racist violence against Chechens, Georgians, Armenians, Azeris and other minority groups.

Nobody knows for sure — or nobody who’s talking — whether it was Nashi activists who beat Oleg Kashin into a coma in the fall of 2010, breaking both his legs and both his jaws, after he wrote a series of investigative pieces critical of Putin’s business dealings. And nobody knows exactly who the two guys were who took a crap on top of Ilya Yashin’s car, right on a Moscow street. (We see both incidents, via grainy surveillance footage. Russia is just that kind of place.) The ingenuity of the political system engineered by Surkov lies precisely in the fact that orders to quash the opposition often don’t have to come from the top, and the people in power can pay lip service to freedom and democracy and wring their hands over violent incidents. Unlike in Soviet times, dissent is not illegal, and it’s tolerated as long as it stays limited to marginal political parties and elite Moscow publications. But it isn’t good for your health or your public reputation.

Nobody suggests that Masha Drokova had anything to do with the dirty side of Nashi. She was the organization’s happy face, giving speeches against official corruption, hosting a pro-Putin talk show and leading demonstrations against supermarkets that sold expired meat. But as her mentor-protégé relationship with Nashi founder Yakemenko becomes more troubled and she gets to know Kashin and other liberal journalists, this naive but likable young woman visibly begins to struggle with the cognitive dissonance of contemporary Russian political life. No one could accuse “Putin’s Kiss” of painting an encouraging portrait of Russia, but there are some signs that the opposition has been revitalized, and Drokova’s story of apostasy is one small part of that. Ilya Yashin laments the way that Nashi has turned an entire generation toward conformity and cynicism, but it was idealism that made Masha kiss Putin in the first place, and that same idealism made her walk away from him.

“Putin’s Kiss” opens this week at Cinema Village in New York, with more cities and home-video release to follow.

: More Andrew O'Hehir

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The final installment delves into the psyche of a troubled, alcohol protagonist after his mother's death

By Katherine A. Powers, Barnes & Noble Review

Topics:Fiction, Books

This article appears courtesy of The Barnes & Noble Review.

The first thing you will want to know about “At Last,” the final volume in Edward St. Aubyn’s five-novel cycle starring Patrick Melrose, is that, yes, you really do have to read the preceding four if you want to appreciate it fully. The second is that if reading about wealthy, conceited, selfish, dissipated, cruel, monstrously awful people is not for you, then, alas, neither are these novels. The third is that the books are brilliant. They are also highly idiosyncratic: Each installment is both a comedy of manners and a wrenching psychological investigation; each oscillates between satire and tragedy, and all are written with flash and brio, ornamented by inspired simile, and spangled with mordant, Wildean wit.

The first four novels have just been published in one paperback volume, beginning with “Never Mind,” a title of apt and dismal pathos. Here we meet Patrick Melrose, five years old and living in a château in Provence with his parents. His alcoholic, drug-befuddled mother, Eleanor, is an American heiress to some part of a dry-cleaning fortune, and it was that attribute that had captivated Patrick’s sadistic English father, David. Trained as a doctor, he abandoned his practice upon marriage — though, we are told, “there had been talk of using some of her money to start a home for alcoholics. In a sense they had succeeded.”

The novel takes place over one terrible day and night, during which — and I must reveal this, as it is pivotal to the entire series — Patrick is raped by his father. While it is happening, the boy manages to disassociate himself from the event, seeing himself perched above the scene, mentally escaping his body. This split — between being there and not being there, between immediacy of experience and fending it off — bedevils Patrick from then on in every area of existence. That breach and his efforts to repair or at least bridge it, through drugs, alcohol, sex and tormented self-examination, make up the cycle’s shattering theme.

As for Patrick’s mother, Eleanor: she is unmindful of everything but pills and booze, charitable causes, and the sure prospect that her husband will humiliate her, publicly if possible, at every opportunity. Absent from home the morning Patrick was attacked and oblivious to it, she later pauses, while writing a check to the Save the Children Fund, to consider Patrick’s subdued demeanor, marveling “at how well her son had turned out. Perhaps people were just born one way or another and the main thing was not to interfere too much.” Patrick’s fear and confusion, Eleanor’s obtuseness and self-involvement, and David’s viciousness and “nimbus of insanity” provide the atmosphere amid which a dinner party is staged. The guests, characters we will meet again in following volumes, introduce us to the first principle of the decadent British upper caste: Nothing is so insufferable as a bore.

In this view, or, rather, under this obsession, a bore is a person who is genuinely tedious — and there are some terrifically funny representatives of that species in these novels — but a bore is also a person who cares about things. The surest defense against being branded a bore is to avoid the appearance of sincerity or compassion and to display a certain outrageousness. As David contemplates his violation of his son at this novel’s conclusion, he reflects, “He must try not to do it again, that really would be tempting fate. David could not help smiling at his own audacity.”

“Bad News,” the second novel, is not exactly a breath of fresh air. Patrick is now 22 and a heroin addict (with a sideline in Quaaludes, amphetamines, cocaine, and alcohol). He is in New York, having received news that his father has died there. Eleanor, now divorced from her tormenter and even more devoted to charitable works, is not on the scene. Patrick has to deal with the body’s cremation and, more pressingly, with replenishing his drug supply. He is a mess: needle-scarred and bruised, his psyche a tangle of anxiety, hatred and self-loathing. The pain is excruciating, the comedy ghoulish: Storming down the street carrying his father’s ashes, he realizes that “it was the first time he had been alone with his father for more than ten minutes without being buggered, hit, or insulted.”

“Some Hope” brings us Patrick at 30, his past lying “before him like a corpse waiting to be embalmed.” He lives in London, free of drugs and drink but more than ever engaged in an interior battle with the demons of the past: with his father, and, to an extent, with his mother, who, for all her ceaseless do-gooding, failed to protect her own son. The novel was meant to complete an intended trilogy, and it does end with Patrick finding a certain amount of peace — and some hope. Aside from that, it is enormously funny, the story organized around an elaborate, snob-infested country house party, a scene of social striving and mortification — the guests, among them Princess Margaret, are described with glorious malice.

With “Mother’s Milk,” Patrick Melrose breaks free of the trilogy and emerges as a married man with two children, though — need it be said? — he is back in a state of “agitated despair.” He is drinking again, can’t sleep, and has a slight problem with Tamazepam, “namely that it wasn’t strong enough. The side effects, the memory loss, the dehydration, the hangover, the menace of nightmarish withdrawals, all that worked beautifully. It was just the sleep that was missing.” His troubles are further compounded by the fear that he will pass on his dark and riven consciousness to his children, just as his parents passed on their own sickness of soul. Meanwhile, Eleanor, who, we learn, may not have been entirely ignorant of Patrick’s father’s abuse, is in the process of disinheriting her son. She is handing over her estate in Provence to a New Age charlatan, a smarmy back rubber and would-be shaman who has set up a “Transpersonal Foundation” on the premises.

Profiting from the three-book foundation upon which it is built, “Mother’s Milk” is a triumph, once again both gruesome and funny. There are wonderful comic set pieces, including a dreadful family vacation in New York City. But the grim work of psychological excavation also continues, this time with Eleanor as its chief object, as Patrick considers the machinations by which the weak exercise their grotesque tyranny. But something new has entered the picture: the children, two little boys, bringing with them an element of sweetness and genuine love.

And so we come to “At Last:” Patrick is 45, and his mother has died: With both parents gone, he feels that he has “been waiting all his life for this sense of completeness.” But even as he pats his mother’s coffin “as an owner might pat a winning race horse,” we see that things are not splendid. He has given up drink but is also separated from his wife and children — and he is also still mystified and tormented by the chaos of his psyche.

How, I sense you wondering, can this still be interesting? It really is: Not only because St. Aubyn is so entertaining a writer but because of the increasing philosophical depth he brings to the story. As Patrick delves deeper and deeper into the mystery of memory and identity, we wonder with him if they are, in fact, the same thing. And if so, the urge to escape is, in his case at least, irresistible — if not through drugs and drink, then through irony: “Forget heroin,” he tells a former mistress. “Just try giving up irony, that deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.”

And yet Patrick’s unwinding story never really loses this double nature, its devotion to pain and the comedy that only partly holds it at bay. St. Aubyn’s own experiences inform these novels, and his unhappy circumstance no doubt endows Patrick’s with its sense of urgency and anguished intensity. But whatever the author’s actual state of mind has been or is now, its expression in art is a complete success.