Provocateur Extraordinaire

"Time," writes W. H. Auden, "worships language and forgives / Everyone by whom it lives." V. S. Naipaul has perhaps given time more to forgive than most; but, in view of the liveliness and range of his writing, forgiveness seems assured. Among those who know him, whether personally (few) or socially/professionally (many), opinions remain divided. Is he his own indomitable man? Or his own most invidious enemy? Or both? Cause and effect. He can be charming, amusing, baffling, mischievous, mean, rude, arrogant, monstrous—but above all intelligent and irascible. As a writer he commanded a much broader consensus, winning praise from V. S. Pritchett, Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, Anthony Powell, Martin Amis, and many others. An East Indian Brahmin raised in Trinidad who earned his scholarly way to Oxford in 1950 at the age of eighteen, his early life was a constant hand-to-mouth struggle; but, by the later stages of his career, his books often sold well; he made deals in six figures with the New York Review and the New Yorker; and he was Bookered, knighted, and Nobeled.

Time Magazine, reviewing Patrick French's solid and absorbing biography, dwells almost exclusively on the scandals and offenses that shadow Naipaul's life, the critic not bothering to mention the title of a single book, of which there are roughly two dozen. I suspect that the reviewer, Pico Iyer, is much less culpable in this injustice than is some flunky editor eager to hasten Time's breakneck plunge toward the level of People and Us Weekly. Both the review and French betray an excessive interest in Naipaul's coldly chaste marriage to a passive, tiresome, abjectly helpful British woman. (At movies Naipaul would turn away from scenes of lovers kissing or caressing.) Later he acquired an Argentine mistress and his long repressed sexuality came roaring to perverse, ferocious, abusive life without either annihilating or perking up his durable marriage.

It is much more to the point that Naipaul the writer soon found his voice and a subject. He published a collection of local-color stories titled Miguel Street and a comic novel, The Mystic Masseur, both set in Trinidad and both making much use of dialects, amusing at first but then cloying. Next came his most popular—some would say greatest—book, A House for Mr. Biswas, a generous and compassionate novel based on his father's life. It is in many ways a traditional novel, but I would be hard put to name another work of fiction that puts us so deeply in a culture so alien, remote, and perturbing—effects traceable in part to Trinidad's uneasy mixture of multiple ethnicities and to that island's complex and cruel history.

Most of the books that followed—and they are divided almost equally between fiction and nonfiction—reflect not only Naipaul's background but also his global travels, which were constant, even compulsive, since he has been driven by an intense curiosity, a sometimes desperate search for new material, and perhaps an equally desperate need to escape from himself. Among the novels A Bend in the River, set in late twentieth-century Africa, explores the paradoxes of postcolonialism with a narrative force and originality hard to match outside Conrad. As for the works of nonfiction, Among the Believers and its sequel, Beyond Belief, examine radical Islam with alarming prescience. In the mid-1980s Naipaul visited the U.S. and made half a dozen states below the Mason-Dixon his primary concern. As a southerner (born, raised, transplanted) I found A Turn in the South disappointing. I had always admired Naipaul's relentless antisentimentalism; but that quality seems to me less stringent here than in most of his books. For me the finest writing of his long and brilliant career comes in the first half of A Way in the World, a book labeled a novel but one that violates and transcends genres at will. The second half "goes off the boil," as French says...