A Way in the World: A Novel. - book reviews

THERE are "painterly" painters and there are "writerly" writers. The latter, at least, tend to be those to whose books you turn because you think they will be good for you, rather than in any expectation of pleasure. Fostered by hundreds of schools of "creative writing" in our universities, the academic style in modern American prose produces a huge domestic oversupply of writerly writing, so that you would hardly think it necessary for us to import it. In the case of V. S. Naipaul's A Way in the World, however, there is an argument to be made for doing so.

Mr. Naipaul's prose, though it is highly wrought, is never obscure or self-indulgent, and, though self-regarding, it is not self-obsessed. His own experience is of interest to him, as to us, only as it is used to illuminate a wide range of interest outside himself. In fact, even though he calls this book "A Novel" it is helpful to regard it as journalism or history instead, both because that would be a much more accurate description of it and because its claim on our attention rests with its wealth of factual material about the colonial and post-colonial history of Trinidad, Mr. Naipaul's native island, and his use of it as part of a general meditation on colonialism.

It is a very writerly dodge to make us try to figure out why he calls it a novel (because he can't think of anything else to call it, he says) in spite of its overwhelmingly autobiographical and historical nature. There are, it is true, a few fictional or semi-fictional interludes, which stand among the chapters of history and reminiscence arranged, so far as we can tell, in no particular order. These he calls, again in a self-conscious, writerly fashion, "unwritten stories." It is as if he is deprecating criticism by pretending that what has been written remains, in some important sense, unwritten.

To such a writer, a story's just having been written down in naked English is very far from its having been tricked out and gussied up in the way something is when it is well and truly written. Sometimes for the reader, however, it is not very easy to tell the difference. Interestingly, what Mr. Naipaul seems to feel is missing for these to be definitively written stories is form. "At one time," he writes,

I thought I should try to do a play or a film--a film would have been better--about the Gulf [of Paria]. I saw it as a three-part work: Columbus in 1498, Raleigh in 1618, and Francisco Miranda, the Venezuelan revolutionary, in 1806: three obsessed men, well past their prime, each with his own vision of the New World, each at what should have been a moment of fulfillment, but really near the end of things, in the Gulf of Desolation.

This is a prelude to the story of Miranda, echoing an earlier chapter on Raleigh that also begins (as does the third "unwritten" story) with an account of how Naipaul got the idea for the story and what form it might take if it were to be written up to his exacting formal standards. Thus the actual form is of an extended and developed notebook entry whose unfinished character is appropriate to the author's constant theme: that of high expectations in contrast with reality, which invariably falls short.

Such unity as the book does possess is also that of a notebook: it is thematic, cross-referential, incidental. In the passage just cited, for example, Naipaul relates the story of Miranda to that of Raleigh and to his earlier introduction (concerned with Columbus's visit to Trinidad in 1498) to a reminiscence, in an altogether different tone, of a writer of the 1930s, Foster Morris. Morris had written quite a good book about Trinidad called The Shadowed Livery and, in the 1950s, he became briefly influential in getting Naipaul started as a writer in touch with his Trinidadian roots. Morris had also had, back in the Thirties, a memorable (to Morris anyway) encounter with a Trinidadian Communist and agitator named Lebrun, whom Naipaul later met in London at a time when Lebrun was being discovered as a prophet of anti-colonialism by the fashionable British Left.

Here, too, there is a connection with Naipaul's reminiscence of his early career, since Lebrun wrote, in a Soviet magazine, the first extended appreciation of his writing. But he also wrote, in an elegantly bound volume that Mr. Naipaul remembers having seen on the shelves of his school library in Trinidad (but not having read), an early version of the story of--Miranda. Thus it all comes back to writing in the end; and all the writing comes together in such ostensibly coincidental and haphazard ways as to suggest careful and highly wrought design. The gap between the accidental conections and the deliberate artifice with which they are engineered is analogous to the gap between the writing project he outlines in his "unwritten" stories and their unfinished form, or between expectation and reality.

His interest in this theme is obviously a legacy of his own colonial experience as an ethnic Indian in the West Indies. Born as heir to a long Asiatic history in the hemisphere which defines itself by its newness, its history-lessness, Mr. Naipaul is himself the sort of isolated figure, torn between the Old and New Worlds, who interests him most. That is how the story of his own development as a writer is relevant to that of Trinidad and the legacy of empire. He is in a position to understand the sense of exalted failure of men such as Columbus and Raleigh and Miranda. Like theirs, perhaps, his disappointment with the imperial project is a measure of the extent to which he--this Indian from Trinidad who won a scholarship to Oxford and has since been able to earn his living by writing for a vast English-speaking audience worldwide--has never really stopped believing in it.

COPYRIGHT 1994 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group