Posts Tagged ‘postcolonialism’

A Postcolonial “Story of Success”: Part Six

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 Three: “A Life of Extraordinary Callousness”
Part Four: “I Went Out And Achieved Anyway”
Part Five: “Africa Has No Future”
Part Seven: “Autonomy, Complexity, Effort, And Reward”

Part Six: “Indians Defecate Everywhere”

This brings us to A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling. The book is a series of five essays, tenuously strung together with some common thread I suppose I am too stupid too see. Naipaul, per usual, retraces and “reimagines” all his old, familiar material; in particular, there is the obligatory complement of postcolonial pessimism. But in Naipaul’s fogeydom this has been corrupted from An Area of Darkness into the incisive if myopic analysis of India: A Wounded Civilization into little more than an extended on essay on why Naipaul is awesome and why everyone else is terrible, a posture which he now extends to his literary criticism as well.

About his acquaintance, Anthony Powell, he wonders: “why did he even bother to write?” This kind of Hitchens-like cruelty can be delightful if it is accurately targeted and not gratuitous, but Naipaul twists the knife around in his former friend and benefactor’s gut, over and over again; the superiority and the excessive, even pointless vituperation are vintage twenty-first-century Naipaul. He who turned his postcolonial squalor into inspiration and used it to see everything from every angles now looks down upon everything; his ways of looking and feeling have. A Writer’s People is the logical conclusion of Naipaul’s narcissism, and, I feel, the end of his writing career. This is why French’s biography was necessary to render him relevant again: circumstances have been much kinder to it than any of Naipaul’s recent work. “Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography,” quipped Waugh at the beginning of his – his last book – and Naipaul, whose vision of the future has been getting darker, narrower, shallower, and less attuned with reality for the entirety of his career, is now completely blind to it. French ended his chronology in 1996 for a reason.

Retrospection begets tunnel vision, then. For Naipaul – and many artists – found inspiration in his misery; just as failure begat success, excessive success has begat failure; Naipaul has lost all sense of self-awareness, and thus all sense of his circumstances. “Intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated,” says Gladwell, and it could just as well describe Naipaul as well as his father, Seepersad. Naipaul and Gladwell share, in a broad sense, a kindred provenance: the scions of gifted yet stunted families in the West Indies (Gladwell’s mother is Jamaican); the incarnations of all the hopes and dreams that couldn’t be fulfilled by others in their families; and so on.

The defining difference is that Gladwell is a generation or two ahead of Naipaul; his mother was an immigrant from Jamaica, but Gladwell himself was born in the UK. Gladwell’s first triumph was then the same as mine: he was born in a first-world nation. In the final chapter of Outliers, entitled “A Jamaican Story,” he strenuously emphasizes how fortunate he has been, how everything has fallen into place for him. Gladwell has here attained a degree of self-awareness that Naipaul hasn’t had since the sixties.

Since Gladwell understands himself better than Naipaul, he also understands his circumstances – broadly, the world – more thoroughly and accurately. This is true in a static sense, but even more so in the kinetic sense. On one hand, you have Naipaul in An Area of Darkness, making statements of immutable sociological fact: “Indians defecate everywhere”; “The novel is a form of social inquiry and thus is outside the Indian purview”; “Africa has no future”; “The world is what it is.” On the other hand, you have Gladwell propounding an “ethnic theory of plane crashes,” recording not only that Air Korea was shockingly dangerous, but also that Air Korea is just as safe as any other airline; Europeans are worse at math than Asians, but they don’t have to be; everyone is colored by their circumstances, but everyone also has agency, ego.

Close reading, linguistic analysis, numerical prestidigitation, extensive travel, interviews, palavers, chats with mavens, bigwigs, dons, the downtrodden, and ordinary people, the accumulation of massive amounts of raw subject matter to be distilled and refined, like carbon into diamond, into the most limpid, lapidary, and resplendent of conclusions: this is the stuff of Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness and Gladwell’s pop sociology, and the styles are also concordant: the sentences are simple, short, every point building upon every other point, words and phrases reappearing like leitmotifs to link and evoke vignettes, vignettes revisited and squeezed by their expert tellers for the maximum possible tautness, reflexivity, and significance. Gladwell’s obsessive rewriting – hinted at in an interview with sportswriter Bill Simmons – can even be compared to Naipaul’s process of revisiting and reimagining his material; there is a layer of abstraction and detachment and refinement. But at the heart of Outliers lies Gladwell’s belief that circumstances can be transformed, which is the greatest self-fulfilling prophesy of all. A Writer’s People is written by, and for, V.S. Naipaul; the only cause V.S. Naipaul believes in is V.S. Naipaul. Outliers is written for the general public in a brave and polemical spirit and the hope that we might change the way we act, and this is why it matters.

Posted by

Chris Morris-Lent

January 15, 2009

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A Postcolonial “Story of Success”: Part Five

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 Three: “A Life of Extraordinary Callousness”
Part Four: “I Went Out And Achieved Anyway”
Part Six: “Indians Defecate Everywhere”
Part Seven: “Autonomy, Complexity, Effort, And Reward”

In his essay “Conrad’s Darkness and Mine,” Naipaul writes that non-fiction enables some obfuscation, but “fiction reveals a writer completely”; in the same essay, he writes of returning to Conrad again at different stages in his life, detailing his attitude as it slowly modulates from contempt to admiration. Ironically, it is Naipaul’s non-fiction that is the most revealing, for just as his perception of Conrad changed, so did his perception of himself. And this perception of himself has colored his perception of everything else: his travel-writing has traced the same trajectory of waxing narcissism.

For example, An Area of Darkness, written a few years after Mr Biswas, begins with a “traveler’s prologue,” a madcap anecdote where Naipaul attempts to reclaim two bottles of spirits confiscated at Bombay customs; this picaresque narrative is an amusing story, as well as a brilliant way of introducing us to the interconnected and institutionalized bureaucratic hell that chokes off Indian progress. India: A Wounded Civilization, of the same period as A Bend in the River, starts with an essay of self-reflection, a meditation on Trinidadian Hindu rituals that were like “trapdoors to an endless past.” An Area of Darkness is classic first-person Naipaul, with the author as the main character; India: A Wounded Civilization is mostly dispassionate, third-person analysis, with much of the material recycled and reimagined, somewhat sterilized by distance and dispassion.

It is the little first-person in India: A Wounded Civilization that yields Naipaul’s most interesting insights: this endless past, he says, dictates how most Indians live; they are irredeemably stuck in a backwards-looking state of Rukmanian bliss, unaware that they are nothing, and happy to be it. But at the same time, the prophet of globalization observes that “there is a new kind of coming and going in the world.” From here it is not so far to see that capitalism must surely come to these people and change them, for better or for worse: “the world is what it is.” Capitalism enables people to exercise their egos – “with money, you can be whoever you want,” says a character from The Wire – but Naipaul sees his subjects as being all circumstance. He dehumanizes them not by dragging them into capitalism and imperialism, as Edward Said contended; he dehumanizes them by disbelieving in their capacity for transformation.

For someone who foresaw globalization, who wrote lovingly of Mr Biswas and of Salim with imagination and precision and pertinence, who transcended his own context to make something of himself, it is an inexplicable myopia: India, far from being “the poorest country in the world,” is now swiftly modernizing; not all of Africa, which Naipaul once proclaimed to have “no future,” looks to have no future; and now Naipaul himself, once hailed as “the world’s writer,” seems in this way dated and irrelevant, guilty of the same inward-looking oblivion which he ascribes to his most contemptible objects of observation. Naipaul’s alter ego in A Bend in the River, Indar, wants everyone to know “what kind of battles he had fought,” but now Naipaul is disinterested in this too; the “wounding” has completely superseded the “wounding,” and all that matters is Naipaul’s ego and his subjects’ circumstances.

Posted by

Chris Morris-Lent

January 14, 2009

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A Postcolonial “Story of Success”: Part Four

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 Three: “A Life of Extraordinary Callousness”
Part Five: “Africa Has No Future”
Part Six: “Indians Defecate Everywhere”
Part Seven: “Autonomy, Complexity, Effort, And Reward”

Part Four: “I Went Out And Achieved Anyway”

My first experience with postcolonial literature was in the ninth grade, when, on the first day of class, my teacher assigned Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve. My teacher was a joyless woman who taught this joyless book as if it were the catechism, with tests on meaningless minutiae in place of recitation, and a universal Western guilt instead of a Catholic one: “REPENT,” she and the book seemed to say, though personally I was in no way responsible for the misery of either of them.

I was in no way responsible because Nectar in a Sieve depicts what is more or less a closed and foreign universe. All of it must be true in some way, and yet the themes were as alien and irrelevant to me as a fourth-grader’s sci-fi fan-fic. The novel is set on a farm – a village – in deep rural India. The setting is probably pre-independence: but I do not know for sure, and very much doubt that it mattered to the writer or her characters. The “hero,” Rukmani, enters an arranged marriage at age 12. She reproduces. A tannery comes to town. Rukmani mounts a one-woman campaign against the tannery. Her campaign fails. One of her children dies. All of this I am paraphrasing from a synopsis. The closing images are the few that I actually do remember: Rukmani, moved to Brontë-esque desperation and isolation, moves to the city and collapses in a state of fatalistic optimism, feeling the same sort of irrational righteousness that my teacher did when she shut the book.

Poverty, traditionalism, hardship, “the ache of modernism,” a one-man revolution, random death, a schizoid acceptance of “fate” while railing against the inevitable: I could just as easily be writing about Things Fall Apart, another book which failed to make itself matter to me. Okonkwo dies: who cares? He was nothing, and the kind of battles he fought were on behalf of a way of life where he could continue to be nothing.

Nectar in a Sieve, Things Fall Apart: these were funereal works that depict a sort of hellish idyll, read for the purpose of seeing how bad things were, and how much worse they got when the White man arrived. This is what postcolonialism meant to me, until I encountered V.S. Naipaul. One facet of Naipaul’s particular genius – peculiar to his “wounded” persona – has been to humanize these characters who live meaningless lives; unlike Okonkwo or Rukmani, they want to make something of themselves, to attain some degree of success – if not status as an outlier – and like Seepersad, it is in their struggles, however futile, that they hint at potential, pass on potential, and become meaningful.

The “wounded” Naipaul recognizes that powerlessness is only as painful insofar as one is aware of it, and these characters are very smart with respect to how powerful they are. No brainless villeins are they: Naipaul’s people speak with vivacity, with humor, with self-awareness; like their creator, they curate and mediate the unacceptable status quo with both levity and outrage, and they are capable of narrating their own stories. Okonkwo and Rukmani need Chinua Achebe and Kamala Markandaya, third-person omniscient narrators, to write on their behalves; the first-person presence behind Miguel Street can speak for himself.

These characters, however pathetic their aspirations and however stunted their minds and bodies, speak the universal language of mankind: making money. While Rukmani and Okonkwo barely barter, the Naipauline hero is typically conscious of his economic plight and intensely desirous of improving it. Here is one such instance of entrepreneurship, on the first page of A House for Mr Biswas, presaged in an earlier story about the same commodity: “‘Potatoes,’ she said. ‘We can start selling potatoes. The price around here is eight cents a pound. If we buy at five and sell at seven…’”

Here the monologue and the plan trail off into the same silence and inaction and nothingness for which the characters are destined. But a reader today should not miss the prescience nor the humor of this kind of writing. Nectar in a Sieve was published in 1954, Things Fall Apart in 1959, and A House for Mr Biswas in 1961, yet it sounds so many years ahead of them. Not only are the characters capitalist, but globally so; they wish to migrate. In Miguel Street, where the narrator does leave Trinidad, and even in Mr Biswas, there are prophesies of globalization: Naipaul saw the growing commonality and significance of global movement, even when the immigrant population of Britain stood at 25,000, Africa was just beginning to decolonize, and it was three decades before anybody knew what a “sweatshop” was, four decades before Thomas L. Friedman declared, Okonkwo-like, that the world was flat. Economics doesn’t conquer principle; economics is principle.

This means that Naipaul, himself a second-generation Trinidadian, is the first important writer to make postcolonialism relevant not only to the West, but relevant universally. The venom of his detractors, like Edward Said’s allegation that he dehumanized his subject matter by approaching it with a Western eye, now seems misdirected and absurd; the trajectory of history, though as erratic as his own forward progress, has vindicated him. There is now a certain reciprocity, a profitable, symbiotic commerce and exchange of ideas; postcolonialism matters to the West, the West matters to postcolonialism.

Miguel Street can thus be rendered in the first person; while that Mr Biswas is in the third person, Naipaul the narrator, shows his youthful empathy for the postcolonial plight as he draws a full, loving, and human portrait of Mr Biswas, whose life parallels Seepersad’s. Mr Biswas’ capital ambitions, like taking his five and turning it into seven, are modest: he wishes only to own his own house, whose solitude and privacy he will use to construct a deeper sense of self, the edifices of his fiction. Naipaul is fictionalizing the sad drama of his father’s failures, captured in correspondence: “I am beginning to think I could have been a writer,” wrote Pa to Vidia; a year later, in mourning for Seepersad – dead at 47 – Vidia contends that had his father had “one-twentieth” the opportunity that an equally gifted Oxonian scion, he could have been a great novelist, instead of a Chris Langan amongst the colorful slums.

In 1961, Biswas wants only a house to call his own; in 1979, the aspirations of Salim, who narrates Naipaul’s later masterpiece A Bend in the River, are not so small-scale. Salim comes from a culture of traders on the Swahili coast: “True Africa was at our backs,” he says. His existence and heritage have been cosmopolitan in a way that most places are these days, and yet he feels insular because he is not wealthy, with little opportunity for Naipauline or Gladwellian advancement, no chance of becoming an outlier. With his coastal society and his old way of life crumbling around him, Salim – again, unlike Okonkwo and Rukmani – realizes it’s time to find “a new life” elsewhere, so he drives deep into the heart of Africa, to a country that’s transparently Zaire, a city transparently Kisangani – to run a shop. Nazruddin, a richer acquaintance, has “sold him the shop cheap”; now Salim wishes to take his shop “from two to six,” a more ambitious profiteering, but still a Biswas-like transaction.

The Naipauline worldview at this time is captured with characteristic elegance and force in the opening 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.” The line has a Gladwellian memorability, but the unsparing directness and veiled complexity are all Naipaul; it deserves a bit of close analysis. “The world is what it is” is Salim’s surrendering to the unalterability of circumstances; he is not able to change the world himself, but he can exert some control over his own destiny. “Men who are nothing” are those who cannot: Rukmani, Okonkwo, and now Mr Biswas lumped in with them. Mr Biswas, in 1961 a defiant hero, has no place in the world in 1979; the “wounded” Naipaul is no longer.

What happened? Capitalism has crept into more or less everywhere; capitalism forces the postcolonial people to wrestle with it. Moral judgments are, in some way, moot, because this encroachment is inexorable – “the world is what it is.” But Naipaul realizes that this is at once good – for without globalization, these people would surely be nothing – and bad – for, like Okonkwo, they wouldn’t know it. Naipaul has captured the essence of what makes good postcolonial literature: he is on the side of capitalism, of stability, mobility, plurality, and advancement; but he knows – or used to know – what anguish it causes to hold these ideals and not be able to realize them. Salim takes his shop from two beyond six to twenty. The “Big Man” consolidates power. The shop drops to fifteen. Salim travels out of Africa for the first time; when he returns, he finds the shop nationalized, back to zero. He flees for London via steamer, and the book ends; perhaps with the help of his emigre friends and fiancee he can carve out a new life for himself. “But this is madness. There can’t be a new life at the end of this.” Powerlessness is only as painful insofar as one is aware of it; “the world is what it is.”

Posted by

Chris Morris-Lent

January 13, 2009

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A Postcolonial “Story of Success”: Part Three

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.

Posted by

Chris Morris-Lent

January 12, 2009

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A Postcolonial “Story of Success”: Part Two

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 Three: “A Life of Extraordinary Callousness”
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 Two: “About the Author”

Gladwell’s conclusion raises an interesting question: if acting is so subordinate to circumstances, then why bother in the first place? This tension between the power of personal agency and the immutability of circumstances – the individual’s desire to make something of himself against the setting that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, seeks to cramp his style – is a common literary trope; it is an outline of any dime novel by Horatio Alger (whom Gladwell mentions and dismisses), and a reduction of the bildungsroman. Ultimately, these protagonists succeed not by “beating” society, but by joining it. A protagonist at war against primitivism and poverty has also often been at the center of postcolonial works.

V.S. Naipaul, who has written of such men in such settings, at first seems himself to be one of them. I have on my desk a new edition of A House for Mr Biswas, Naipaul’s scintillating prose epic that catapulted him to international prominence at the Collins-esque age of 28. Mr Biswas was published in 1961; my edition was printed 40 years later, in 2001. Here is the “About the Author” blurb, from the first page:

V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at Oxford he began to write, and since then he has followed no other profession. He is the author of more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction and the recipient of numerous honors, including the Nobel Prize in 2001, the Booker Prize in 1971, and a knighthood for services to literature in 1990. He lives in Wiltshire, England.

This blurb is more than a blurb, it is a subtle masterpiece of self-mythology; and this subtle masterpiece of self-mythology is the same in all of my new Naipaul books from the same publisher and print run – An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization, and so on. If Naipaul didn’t write it himself, he definitely had some control over its style and content; how one sees oneself, how one presents oneself to others, is of paramount importance. And how Naipaul seems to see and present himself in 2001 – I think these Vintage editions must have been printed in the wake of renewed public interest, following his Nobel Prize – how he presents himself is this: born on Trinidad (at the squalid periphery of the crumbling British empire); escaped via his own wits and cunning; began to write; critical and commercial success, fame and fortune, the complete fulfillment of potential, the attaining of status as an outlier.

The whole narrative follows an uninterrupted and smooth trajectory; there is a peak, but no troph; triumphs follow the only tragedy, the circumstances of his birth. It is the selfsame Horatio Alger story, a bildungsroman without reconciliation and reintegration, what Gladwell calls the old and tired myth of the “self-made man.”

Now, thanks to Patrick French’s towering biography, The World Is What It Is, the casual reader can see how oversimplified – if not outright false – it is. The gaps between those opening sentences are filled in, each to the tune of 100 pages of prose, and the smooth section of sine wave becomes an upward-sloping EKG. Trinidad was uncommonly terrible, but Naipaul’s pedigree was uncommonly promising: his father, Seepersad, was a very smart man, a sometime journalist and a would-be fiction writer; his mother was a strong personality who held the family together; for Gladwell, who argues that “practical intelligence” of the kind Mrs. Naipaul had, and who estimates the heritability of IQ at fifty percent, there could scarcely be better parentage for a writer. Seepersad is a major character in the first part of the book: in the style of Gladwell’s Jewish immigrants turned successful entrepreneurs and parents of lawyers, he works tirelessly and selflessly to inculcate within his son not only the kinds of ambitions that his circumstances prohibit him from fulfilling, but also the means of fulfilling them. Young Vidia goes off to Queen’s Royal College, Trinidad’s simulacrum of Lakeside or Eton; Seepersad continues to sacrifice for his family; Vidia wins one of the very few scholarships from Trinidad to Oxford, and departs for England with more trepidation than triumph.

The rest, of course, is just as complicated. Until the deus ex machina of his first steady job, offered by an uncommonly high-ranking, kind, proactive and perceptive BBC don, Naipaul lives a life marked by solitude, desperation, and depression that dips dangerously close to the suicidal in its severity. After moving to make it big, Naipaul is at his most vulnerable: you can see how easy it would have been – in the absence of a Gladwellian catalyst or two – to ruin him, which is what makes this early section the most exhilarating, though we already know the outcome. French’s portrait of Oxford is an understated and gloomy companion to the stultifying fifties redbrick in Lucky Jim: it has all the desolation of Brideshead Revisited, but none of the splendor; all the one-upmanship of A Portrait of An Artist as a Young Man’s final chapter, but few of the experiences that, examined with retrospective clarity, become formative. “I learned nothing from Oxford,” says Naipaul, but without it he would have been nothing.

This paradox is the nucleus of both French’s biography and Naipaul’s fiction. Once Naipaul graduates, he, like his one-time model Evelyn Waugh, is forced into writing by the lack of other opportunities; his past becomes a crippling barrier as he is rejected from job after job, but it’s also the only thing that he has. Similar contradictions and complexities abound: he is at once saved by a job broadcasting Caribbean literature over the BBC, and constricted by it. He leans on his first wife, Patricia Hale, and he abuses her; he writes her letters of impassioned love and unbridled contempt: you hate someone when you show yourself at your most vulnerable, he says, but in his earliest and most outward-looking fictional period this is exactly what Naipaul would do, culminating in A House for Mr Biswas – a book that tells you far more “about the author” than the blurb just behind front cover could ever obscure.

Posted by

Chris Morris-Lent

January 11, 2009

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A Postcolonial “Story of Success”: Part One

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 Two: About the Author
Part Three: “A Life of Extraordinary Callousness”
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 One: “Ego and Circumstance”

My introduction to the professional world came near the end of summer 2007, when a former executive at RealNetworks – the company culpable for that awful video player that is now to computers what VHS is to TVs – happened upon me and offered me a job. It was dumb luck; I had posted my informal curriculum vitae to my high school’s Listserv in an attempt to woo tutoring clients. There weren’t enough, but I prided myself on having never held a real job before, so I e-mailed back: “what’s the compensation?” He responded: “Twenty dollars an hour.” I said “done,” and so it came to pass that, for the first time in my life, economics conquered principle; I woke up early to drive to Downtown Seattle and sit in the sterile office of an Internet start-up for forty hours a week.

The following spring, the journalist Lauren Collins came to lecture to a meeting of my magazine. She delivered her spiel to the prospective muckrakers: “just be ready to take anything that’s out there,” she said, and then there was a forgettable question-and-answer period. Afterward many said to me what I had thought: they had read her work; she was a good writer; but her demeanor was a little skittish, her advice obvious, her extemporaneous speaking awkward, the whole thing underwhelming. Some expressed pessimism for the dwindling journalistic job-market, but others said gnomically: if she could get a job, why can’t we?

All this might have been expected; Lauren Collins was, after all, 27. But while my friends graduated, took entry-level semi-menial jobs, and moved into housing projects with an eye of doing something that was both challenging and remunerative in maybe a decade, Collins was already a staff writer for the New Yorker.

There are tens of thousands of aspiring young journalists – thousands with similar or greater skill – who would kill for that job at that age. Lauren Collins’ backstory is unknown to me, but to write for “Talk of the Town” six years out of college must have taken not only this merit – the kind of merit thousands of other aspirants have – but also dogged determination and incredible, providential luck. In her case, the last two factors were clearly the determining ones; she was both lucky and good – good enough, at least.

Now, another New Yorker staff writer who is both lucky and good has written a book about similar success stories. Outliers is Malcolm Gladwell’s third book of pop social science, after The Tipping Point and Blink, and stylistically and structurally it follows the formula of his first two runaway successes: anecdotes, like the one above, alternate with analysis; each chapter concludes with a plainly stated and memorable take-home message that adds to both the smaller points Gladwell has made before, and the grander point that he is making.

Gladwell’s grander point – his thesis – is this: success is never due to merit, or merit alone; upbringing, travail, practical intelligence, culture, and even birth dates – what I’ll broadly term “circumstances” – is also of great importance. It seems obvious to someone like me: without a stable nuclear family, I might never have discovered my love of learning; without a stimulating public-school program full of similarly-minded people, I might never have cultivated this love; if the public-school program weren’t housed with a divergent program, I might never have learned to talk to people different than me; if the admissions officer at Columbia was going through a rough divorce, I might have gone elsewhere; if my employer had been browsing through his e-mail with less diligence, I might have worked somewhere else. Having been ill with dyspepsia and insomnia for the last calendar year, which has to a great extent – if temporarily – diluted my intellect, I see that everything I value about myself is contingent on my fortunes, as much as my talents; all of my prosperity and achievements teeter precariously atop flimsy scaffolding. I stopped writing recreationally for the better part of a semester, and I’ve found recapturing my erstwhile abilities to be a laborious and iterative process, one that’s impossible in full until I get better.

Failure, then, begets failure; success begets success. Opportunities lead to more opportunities, and soon those born equal to others but afforded better chances are actually better than their less fortunate brethren.

Employing a bit of formal terminology, Gladwell calls this phenomenon by its economic name: self-fulfilling prophesy. Many of the individuals that people his book are just this: extraordinary savants born into extraordinary contexts, who do extraordinary things. There is Bill Gates, whose parents are wealthy enough to send him to Seattle’s Lakeside, the West Coast’s finest private school, where he has providential propinquity to a computer; there is J. Robert Oppenheimer, who talks his way out of attempted murder and into the directorship of Los Alamos; there is the lesser-known Joe Flom, who was fortunate enough to be rejected from leading law firms just when corporations were beginning to take their most lucrative business elsewhere.

So these are the successes, the outliers, and on the basis of their effort other successes have been made: had there been no Gates, there would have been no software boom in Seattle, no RealNetworks, no high-paying summer job for me (and there were hundreds of college students better qualified for that position than I was.) The other half of Outliers, seamlessly woven in with the rest, details the failures: people of extraordinary talent and mediocre circumstances, whose potential has been either channeled less constructively or outright frustrated. The most memorable vignette is that of Chris Langan.

He has an IQ of 200 – that is, he is to Einstein as Einstein is to an average American; he can memorize and connect at will; his sentences come “marching out one after another, polished and crisp like soldiers on a parade ground”; he is, in his intellectual potential, an outlier.

“But so what?” Gladwell asks. For Chris Langan is a sort of Herbert Stempel figure, a real-life Will Hunting: he has accomplished nothing. Stempel worked a low-level public service job in Queens before the Quiz Show imbroglio; afterwards, he held the same job, unable to parlay his brief exposure to NBC’s bigwigs into any sort of upward social mobility; in spite of his high IQ and his freakish memory, he couldn’t transcend his circumstances. Likewise, Langan came from nothing: a broken home, a move to Montana, a failed attempt at college in Portland and Bozeman; this precipitated a move to Long Island, where he endured the daily drudge as a bouncer not twenty miles from Herbert Stempel.

Chris Langan is an extreme example, but Gladwell suggests that our society is one shot through, overwhelmingly, with people like him: there are myriad potential outliers, yet few are born in the right place at the right time. It is this conclusion that makes Outliers his most polemical and bravest work to date: he asks his huge readership not just to change the way they think, but the way they act.

Next time: what kind of outlier is V.S. Naipaul?

Posted by

Chris Morris-Lent

January 10, 2009

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