In 1991, as Edward St. Aubyn was about to publish “Never Mind”—the first of five highly autobiographical novels, in which extremes of familial cruelty and social snobbery are described with a tart precision that is not quite free of cruelty and snobbery—he went for a walk with his mother in the English countryside and told her that his father had repeatedly raped him as a young boy. Her response “wasn’t totally satisfactory,” St. Aubyn said, several weeks ago. “She said, ‘Me, too’ ”—meaning that his father had raped her as well. “She was very, very keen to jump the queue and say how awful it was for her.”

St. Aubyn was eating lunch in an almost empty restaurant a short walk from his home, in the Notting Hill area of London. The only other diners, a few tables away, were two of his friends: Lady Antonia Fraser, the writer, who is also the widow of Harold Pinter; and Tristram Powell, a filmmaker who is the son of Anthony Powell, the author of “A Dance to the Music of Time,” a cycle of autobiographical novels centered on the English élite, to which St. Aubyn’s work has been compared. When St. Aubyn had come in—a long cashmere coat over a gray jacket, and his right hand braced and bandaged after a skiing accident—they had asked him to join them for a glass of wine, and for fifteen minutes there had been good-natured talk about the Tony prospects of the recent Broadway production of Pinter’s “Betrayal,” and about a sad decline in the quality of literary feuds.

Then St. Aubyn had moved to his preferred corner, and recalled some of his life’s most fraught experiences with steady irony, and in an unhurried accent of English privilege that—like the paintings that hang in his drawing room, and the tone of amused contempt that sometimes marks his prose—is part of his inheritance from a father who tortured him. Like his father, Roger, he is a member of White’s, the oldest gentlemen’s club in London.

St. Aubyn said that his mother, Lorna, a descendant of American industrialists, “was very keen to establish that she had no idea” about the sexual assaults, and “didn’t even know such a thing existed.” She “really was a person of good intentions, but if ever it was clear that good intentions were not enough . . .”

He narrowed his eyes. St. Aubyn’s movements have a bomb-disposal delicacy. He’ll brush the tips of two or three fingers against his lower lip for half a minute, or he’ll tilt his head slightly backward, as if in response to a tiny surprise. He is fifty-four and the father of two, and has the air of someone who is puzzled, and rather impressed, to find that he is not dead.

The novels that draw on the St. Aubyn family disaster—the fiction and the life both involve a perfect house in the South of France, a brutal English snob, an American heiress with good intentions, and a son who becomes a suicidal junkie—were initially resisted, by some, for their upper-class milieu. But the books, which focus on a family named Melrose, are now widely admired for their forensic and comic variation on the theme of trauma and imperfect recovery. In Britain, the publishing marketplace has become so saturated with nonfiction reënactments of this theme that the genre is known, with brusque mockery, as the “misery memoir,” and bookstores have “Painful Lives” sections filled with such titles as “Tell Me Why, Mummy” and “Please, Daddy, No.” St. Aubyn is seen to have done something remarkable with his balance of wretchedness and wit. For someone who used to think that he had met every reader of his work, the literary recognition has been gratifying. In 2006, the fourth Melrose novel, “Mother’s Milk,” was nominated for a Booker Prize. Rachael Horovitz, a producer of “Moneyball,” is working on a complete series of Melrose films for television, a project that she recently described as “a modern-day, albeit twisted” version of the miniseries adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited.” St. Aubyn told me that Pinter, not long before his death, took him to lunch in a Notting Hill restaurant a few doors away and sternly praised his work. “He could be very ferocious,” St. Aubyn recalled. “But when that was actually in the form of kindness it was very impressive.”

He is entertaining, teasing company. We had several meetings, at a time of flooding in the south of England. One day, when a London paper’s banner headline was “RED ALERT,” I met him after having just crossed the Thames, and I said something about the river not looking as swollen as I had expected. He later e-mailed: “Someone with a wide variety of extreme-weather channels available to him in America is unlikely to be shaken until several herds of cattle and a large number of cars and houses have been lifted into the air, swirled about and dumped onto exploding power lines or into the corpse-strewn floodwaters of ruined cities.” This is also how he speaks.

He recently finished a novel that, for the first time in more than a decade, does not involve Patrick Melrose, his psychologically fractured stand-in, or the awful senior Melroses. He also gave up his usual work habits—wrenching personal excavations, repeated revisions, and “the tyranny of the artiste maudit cliché”—in favor of a quick attempt at fun. The new novel, “Lost for Words,” describes antics surrounding the awarding of a Booker-like literary prize. “I rather missed out on play,” he told me. (He also missed out on the Booker.) “It’s a bit late in the day, but why not start now? If not at five, then at fifty.”

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The irony in the title of St. Aubyn’s third Melrose novel, “Some Hope,” published in 1994, points both to a career-long interest in the idea of psychological deliverance and to a desire not to be mistaken for an artless writer. To read the novels is to watch a high intelligence outsmart cliché (or, to use a more Melrosian word, vulgarity), and so protect his protagonist’s literary distinction. Similarly, St. Aubyn has been careful to protect his own life from the dull tarnish of remembrance-and-release; it would pain him if readers mistook a twenty-year literary project for a therapeutic one. “What he wanted was a very pure success,” Oliver James, an old friend of St. Aubyn’s, and a clinical psychologist, told me.

But the awkward fact is that writing saved St. Aubyn’s life. Years of psychoanalysis, and the controlled fiction that followed, deferred the threat of suicide. St. Aubyn describes Patrick as an alter ego, though there are some differences. Patrick ends up with a day job—he’s a barrister—which St. Aubyn, with a seeming shrug of privileged incomprehension, barely makes convincing. More important, Patrick has no experience of therapy, beyond a group meeting or two in rehab. Instead, he ruminates, and makes sour, studied jokes. The novels enact, and describe, therapeutic progress, but St. Aubyn, led by a literary taste for compression, and by the desire to create “vivid and intense and non-boring” fiction, left out much of the process that helped him survive to midlife.

James, who has known St. Aubyn since childhood, and who once saw him, as a teen-ager, teaching others how to inject heroin, has charted his friend’s progress, and calls him an “extraordinarily emotionally intelligent person.” But the stability that St. Aubyn has achieved isn’t quite calm. The novels can feel like heavy fabric that has been pulled beautifully taut by sweating effort that’s just out of frame, and there’s some of that in St. Aubyn’s wary charm: his equilibrium requires constant monitoring of experience and thought. He said that there are certain words that, in an instant, can raise his blood pressure from a hundred and five to two hundred. He paid almost obsessive attention to the plans we made, and was distressed by any threat to them. In conversation, he’d talk over any attempted interruption but hold the truncated question in his mind and answer it several minutes later. When I arrived, punctually, at his house, he answered the door, in coat and scarf, four or five seconds after I pressed the bell. It seemed important not to disappoint him. Thanks to his unfamiliarity with cell phones—he had just bought his first one—I heard, at the end of a voice-mail message to me, a snatch of peremptory conversation on another line, in which he complained about “one or two villains” who were “not contributing to my peace of mind.” (When I mentioned this to him, he was relieved I could tell that I was not one of those being slighted.)