The World Is What It Is

The last of the New York Times Ten Best Books of 2008 is The World Is What It Is, the authorized biography of Nobel-Prize winning novelist V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French. I was at something of a disadvantage here, as I've never read any of Naipaul's work, but a good biography is something I relish. Even without reading Naipaul, I got a complete sense of the man from this book. I'm not eager to meet him.

What does one do with a biography of a man who is, in many ways, a failure as a human being? Certainly there are books about the villains of history, but Naipaul isn't precisely that. Born in Trinidad in 1932, he is descended from immigrants from India. After a hard-scrabble childhood, with a father who aspired to be a writer but was something of a born loser, Naipaul earned a scholarship to Oxford, and has lived in England ever since. When he won the Nobel, he gave tribute to his home, England, and the land of his ancestors, India, but nothing was said about Trinidad. He felt his being born there was a mistake.

He married a British woman and found work writing radio programs for the BBC. He was lumped in with a group of writers who were known as post-colonials--those who came from countries that were once part of the British empire. However, he would not identify with a third-world mentality, and in fact was something of a keen racist. Much of his writing over the years has been a kind of travel writing, where he would visit countries and write about them with a gimlet eye. He did that about India, and earned some enmity about it, and then wrote about Latin America, including a stop in Argentina. While there he met a woman with whom he would have a twenty-four-year affair.

In addition to being a racist, Naipaul was an emotional bully, mistreating his wife, Pat, for years. He didn't hide his affair with the Anglo-Argentine Margaret. Page after page of this book chronicles Naipaul's appalling behavior. He is a snob, he is arrogant, and he doesn't suffer fools. He pushes away his family, and is antagonistic with almost everyone. French, who was hired to write the book, lays it out in the introduction: "I noticed that when he was being rude or provocative in this way, Naipaul was full of glee. Creating tension, insulting his friends, family or whole communities left him in excellent spirits." It isn't readily apparent how he kept any friends.

French admirably describes Naipaul's works, but of course it's not the same as actually having read them. His first famous book was A House for Mr. Biswas, which was ostensibly about his father. The title of this biography comes from the first sentence of A Bend in the River: "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." I would imagine there isn't a sentence that Naipaul wrote that sums him up better than that one.

A sense of outrage builds as one reads how he treated his wife, the woman who waited on him hand and foot. Pat was stricken with breast cancer, and he did attend to her while she was sick, but it didn't stop him from touring far-flung nations for a book about Islam. While she was dying he met a Pakistani woman and impulsively proposed to her--he was engaged to her while waiting for Pat to die. He gave an interview to The New Yorker where he frankly confessed to being a habitual visitor to prostitutes. Pat may have known about Margaret, but she didn't know about that. Naipaul, like a man awakening to reality, was too late to realize what he had done. "Vidia had to live the responsibility of what he had done, and bear the blame for the rest of his days. 'She suffered. It could be said that I had killed her. It could be said. I feel a little bit that way.'"

The amazing thing about this biography is that it is authorized. Naipaul reviewed the manuscript, but asked for no changes. What could be the reasons for this? He either didn't bother to read it, or he is completely comfortable with the man he is. Or he is a person who has no introspection. Reading his fiction might give one a better insight to the answer to this question, but I wonder if I could read his books without remembering the disgust I felt in reading about his life.