Naipaul & Melancholy

The news Naipaul brings us from far-off and nearby places in The Writer and the World is disquieting more often than not. His writing is suffused with a great melancholy and loneliness, and one feels about him that he is - like the alcoholic consul in Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano - "homesick for being homesick." He has discernible flaws; there is a cruel streak running through many of his observations, and a tendency to overrate the sustenance provided by bourgeois comforts. But his is a many-angled way of seeing the world; he speaks to us in a voice of necessary lament and, unlike so many who set themselves up as secular prophets, he is in no way inauthentic. One can accuse him of an excess of gravitas, but that is precisely his point. For Naipaul is determined to "give us the gloom" as the black woman from North Carolina in the opening of "A Turn in the South" puts it after she listens to a description of the sober book he intends to write about her part of the country whether we like it or not. Even the spurned Theroux concedes, "all his dire warnings have been fulfilled." I suppose one way of shooting the messenger is to parody him or ignore him altogether, but we do so at our own peril. Far wiser, I think, to pay close attention.

from "Suffering, Elemental as Night" by Daphne Merkin a New York Times review of The Writer and the World by V. S. Naipaul