Reviewed:
The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling by V.S. Naipaul

Part One: “Ego and Circumstance”
Part Two: “About the Author”
Part Four: “I Went Out And Achieved Anyway”
Part Five: “Africa Has No Future”
Part Six: “Indians Defecate Everywhere”
Part Seven: “Autonomy, Complexity, Effort, And Reward”

Part Three: “A Life of Extraordinary Callousness”

The more V.S. Naipaul looks into his own past, the more revisionist his personal history becomes: and yet The World Is What It Is is an authorized biography, hewn with incredible candor and wracked with the pain of accurate recollection. French has access to literally everything, including Naipaul’s correspondence – from which he quotes liberally – and he has conducted a number of long interviews, harvesting quotations both juicy and full. Naipaul unfailingly remembers who he was, but he often repudiates that person, even as he owns up to it without the slightest hint of apology. “They just didn’t matter to me,” he says of Pat’s parents, though in some small way they must have.

“They just didn’t matter to me”: it could be a Naipauline catchphrase, and as his success waxed in the way success often does, it became truer and truer. His friends, struggling West Indian writers from Caribbean Voices, disappear from his life as he ceases to struggle. “Friends were not important to me and never have been,” he says. Prosperity begets prosperity; A House for Mr Biswas, published at the Collins-esque age of 28, is proclaimed a masterpiece; Naipaul now has the resources to travel; experience begets experience; he branches out into non-fiction; his world-view solidifies; in 1971, he wins the Booker Prize for In a Free State; eight years later, A Bend in the River concludes this period of frenetic creativity.

Meanwhile, Vidia grows further from Pat: no longer needed as an emotional bulwark, he finds her useless, and she begins to spiral downward. James Wood, in the New Yorker, proposes a schizoid Naipaul: he splits him into a “wounded” and “wounding” mode, with the former encompassing his rage at his circumstances, and the latter his narcissism at overcoming them; as he ages, the former is all but supplanted by the latter. Christopher Hitchens, in the Atlantic, characterizes Naipaul’s works as having “extraordinary skill,” and his life as having “equally extraordinary callousness”; the two are far from contradictory, as the former brought about the latter.

At the biography’s close, Pat is dead of cancer; all the compassion and sorrow Naipaul felt when his father died, during his first hard year at Oxford, has evaporated into narcissism: the effect of four decades of vindication, of being “knighted for services for literature.” French’s work ends abruptly with Naipaul’s remarriage to a Muslim journalist, something inconceivable at the beginning of the book among the insular Hindu community of Trinidad: Naipaul really is no longer Trinidadian, though he would later return to his homeland and exhort its residents to be so.

At one point, French notes that Naipaul wrote of his alter ego in The Enigma of Arrival: “He could, within reason, remake himself and his past and his ancestry.” This is what Naipaul has done: as he gained more control over his life, he has gained more control over his identity, and effaced – more externalized – the anguish of his circumstances.

The reimagination – the narcissism – is in his “About the Author” blurb; the remembrance – the circumstances – are in his biography, and this is why it is so good. At first seems odd that Naipaul would choose to reveal his vulnerable self to the reading public, for whom he wore the mask of “About the Author” for so long, but he probably feels the same way that he did towards Pat towards the end of her life: he hates us all.

In Outliers, Gladwell is sometimes guilty of cherry-picking at best and Manichaeism at worst – most everything always goes right for his outliers, and his failures are spectacularly unlucky. The checkered past of V.S. Naipaul, presented by French, would fit as poorly into his frame as it would into a bildungsroman or Horatio Alger narrative. But sometimes Gladwell’s simplicity shines over Naipaul’s retrospection: he is right when he says that “No one – not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses – ever makes it alone,” and this is why Naipaul has, once again, given us both himself and the finger.