V. S. Naipaul and His Critics

There was a time when V. S. Naipaul, reporting on the growth pains of the postcolonial world, was a favorite of the literary establishment. There was something eye-opening about the essays that began appearing in 1969 in the U.S. in The New York Review of Books, whether the subject was black power in the Caribbean, the terror and the banality in Argentina, ethnic bloodletting in Africa, or the wretchedness of India. These essays were the outcome of travels to far-flung places of empire that were undertaken by Naipaul after the appearance of his breakthrough novel, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961). Two nonfiction books—The Middle Passage (1962) and The Loss of El Dorado (1969)—reported on the effects, past and present, of imperial (mis)adventures in his West Indian “homeland,” while An Area of Darkness (1964) was an account of his first journey to India, his ancestral homeland. The travels in turn fed into novels set in formerly colonized lands—The Mimic Men (1967), In a Free State (1971: Booker Prize Winner), and Guerrillas (1975)—and marked a departure from the Trinidadian matter that (along with Mr. Biswas) originally established his reputation in England: The Mystic Masseur(1957), The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), and Miguel Street (1959).