The appearance in bookstores of the bound, published version of the Starr report mere hours after its release is yet another proof that something in our culture has radically changed: not so much the death of outrage, as William Bennett would have it, as the death of privacy, or of simple decency. The fact that those who govern feel that it's not only necessary but perfectly all right for us to know every detail of someone's sex life appears to be quite unprecedented. Is it even legal to expose these facts? If not, what legal recourse is there? If Bill Clinton were a mere private citizen, mightn't he himself file a lawsuit to protect his privacy?

The same questions inevitably pop up in regard to certain recent memoirs. That which has made the biggest impression on the public is Paul Theroux's Sir Vidia's Shadow, the story of the author's thirty-year friendship with the older, more established author V. S. Naipaul and its very sticky end. Theroux, of course, is a past master at exposing the intimate lives of friends and loved ones to public scrutiny. His companion novels My Other Life and My Secret History both feature protagonists who are to the ordinary reader—and even to the informed one—indistinguishable from Theroux himself, and characters who seem exactly like his ex-wife, Anne, and other family members. Anne Theroux and Paul's brother Alexander have complained, but to no avail: the novels, Theroux insisted, were fiction—art—and if you confuse them with reality, you must be some kind of a philistine.

The premise of Sir Vidia's Shadow has outraged a substantial portion of the literary community, but Theroux has been quick to claim the moral high ground: not, this time, by arguing that his book is art and therefore subject only to the dictates of art, but by insisting that it is “the truth,” and that it was, after all, his friend Naipaul himself who always insisted that only the truth can set you free. “Naipaul always said, Don't prettify it, and The greatest writing is a disturbing vision offered from a position of strength—aspire to that, and Tell the truth.”

We should all be able to agree that truth must be the object both of fiction and nonfiction; but what purpose is the writer asking the truth to serve? Why, in other words, has Theroux written Sir Vidia's Shadow? Why is it important that we know the truth about Naipaul and his nasty little habits? For while I have no doubt that what Theroux writes about Naipaul is, if one-sided, the truth, I feel at the same time that he has been less than truthful about his own motives in writing the book.

In print and on the podium, Theroux has given rationales that sound impeccably high-minded. The book was a technical challenge: “I realized that there was no model for it. Some books existed in which a writer described his or her relationship with another older writer, but these were always glowing accounts …,” he wrote in the New York Times Book Review (November 1, 1998). Also, he'd like us to think that he really meant the book to be a tribute. Naipaul is fanatical, yes, but we are reminded that “the best writers are the most fanatical; so the truest portrait of a writer can never be a study of virtue” (ibid). This is true, but it fails to convince this reader, at any rate, that the composition and publication of Sir Vidia's Shadow was anything but an extremely hostile act.

“I'm not a spurned lover in writing this book,” Theroux said in a recent lecture. And possibly he's not, in spite of the rude end his long-time friend put to the relationship, cutting off communications and, by way of explanation, simply advising Theroux to “Take it on the chin and move on.” But another reason for Theroux's hostility springs irresistibly to mind, and that is professional jealousy. Theroux himself refers to his younger self, in relation to Naipaul, as a sorcerer's apprentice, and although there are only eleven years' age difference between the two writers, the relationship was from the beginning one of master and disciple. The problem was that in the intervening years the disciple, however famous and successful he became, never quite caught up with the master. It is by now evident that Paul Theroux will never, like Naipaul, be a “great writer,” Nobel Prize material. He remains what he was twenty years ago: a competent author of middlebrow potboilers, and a readable and justly-acclaimed travel writer.

This is not the first time Theroux has written about Naipaul. Back during the days of his youthful discipleship he wrote an academic study, V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work. Some years later he profiled Naipaul in the London newspaper, The Telegraph. After the appearance of that article Theroux noticed that “some people had come to like [Naipaul] on the basis of the piece, others had said they found him insufferable, on the same evidence.” I suspect that the same will be true of this book, in spite of the press's prudish squeals of disgust over what is just a little too easy to interpret as racism, snobbery, and elitism on Naipaul's part.

There is, for example, his habit of referring to everyone he disrespects as “infies.” When the two writers first meet as teachers at Makerere University in Uganda, Naipaul dismisses as infies all of their colleagues, jawing away asininely in the staff-room. It is to be sure a cruel and ruthless way to speak, but don't most of us, in our heart of hearts, know an infy when we see one? After Naipaul's departure from Makerere, Theroux has to admit that he has lost most of his pleasure in the place; looking around him he sees, in spite of himself, through Naipaul's eyes, and what he sees are—it cannot be denied—infies.

Naipaul's pronouncements on what he observes in Africa are brutal, and in setting them down in print Theroux knows very well that the p.c. police will swoop down on Naipaul with cries of “Racist!” Yet what Naipaul was saying was much more complex than mere racism, as Theroux is well aware. Africa, Naipaul thought, was (this was 1966) “an obscene continent, fit only for second-rate people. Second-rate whites with second-rate ambitions, who are prepared, as in South Africa, to indulge in the obscenity of disciplining Africans.” The teachers at Makerere were “overpaid expatriates patronizing Africans and giving the impression of imparting an education. … The worst of it was the tameness of it all, the absence of criticism, the complacency, the extravagant way African effort was praised.” This praise Naipaul referred to as “Blackwash.”

Theroux is generous and honest enough to admit that Naipaul's uncompromising attitude came from his “impossibly high standards. He said there was no point in having standards unless they were high. He did not compromise. He expected the best, in writing, in speaking, in behavior, in reading.” Yet Naipaul's dismissive remarks sting, as Theroux means them to. He refers collectively to Arabs as “Mr. Woggy”; he encourages his African houseboy unwittingly to demean himself; occasionally he gets in a temper and takes the wheel of the car provided by Makerere, humiliating his driver by making him ride in the back seat. There is a pronounced sadistic streak in Naipaul that his one-time disciple can't resist pointing out.

But if Naipaul has a sadistic side, so too has Theroux, although in this memoir he invariably portrays himself as naive, kindly, well-disposed toward all the world. It is in his depiction of Naipaul's wife Pat that Theroux really gives himself away. Pat is in every way her husband's foil, gentle, polite, softhearted and yielding, an irresistible target for a sadistic husband, and Naipaul, of course, bullies her. From time to time she breaks into “helpless blubbing, either as the result of a disagreement or simply because of some sorrowful sight—broken shoes, a snotty-nosed child, a woman bereft, a gardener laboring on his knees.” Her abjectness—the “tears on her pretty protruding lips”—is erotic not only to the husband but to the young acolyte as well: “I did not know why, but her weeping made me want to hold her and fondle her breasts.”

Sorcerer's apprentice indeed! During one long stint at a Kenyan hotel, Naipaul, hard at work on a book, asks the younger man to “Keep Pat company,” having incidentally remarked not too long before that he himself had given up sex. Theroux, rightly or wrongly, interprets this as an invitation to embark on an affair with the pretty and pliable Pat, although he claims to have been too shy to avail himself of the opportunity. (Pat, he hints, would have been only too eager.) Throughout the two men's friendship, to judge from Theroux's account, poor Pat was an object of mixed lust and contempt not just to her husband but also to his eager pupil.

Theroux accuses Naipaul of misogyny, and points to numerous incidents in his work that confirm this diagnosis. Yet long before this one, Theroux's own books had always struck me as being full of gratuitous misogyny: the view of women in Girls at Play, to take one example, is twisted and unmistakably hostile. Throughout Sir Vidia's Shadow, though, Theroux paints himself as someone who holds the fair sex in the highest regard. He claims to have been deeply shocked by the scene in A Bend in the River in which Salim beats his lover and spits between her legs; his disgust was such, he says, that as one of the judges for the Booker Prize that year he decided to vote against the book, the disclosure of which fact can only have been calculated to enrage Naipaul, and which was not strictly essential to the narrative.

Theroux has done his level best to harm his former friend, all the while whitewashing his own motives by reiterating how extraordinary, how brilliant, how very remarkable Naipaul was. It is a clever performance but also cheap and hypocritical. One emerges from the experience of reading Sir Vidia's Shadow thinking that while it must have been uncomfortable and expensive to be Naipaul's friend, it must also have been invigorating, and that he has proved in the final reckoning to be a far more provocative and intellectually valuable writer than Theroux himself. The lessons he offered Theroux—and there were many—constituted ample payment for all the lunch and dinner checks he failed to pick up.

“Every good book suggests that the writer, however painful its subject, has arrived at some inward peace about it, some inner resolution, even of anger and despair, even though this peace and resolution is purely temporary,” Naipaul told Theroux. By this criterion Sir Vidia's Shadow, positively throbbing with rage and wounded ego, has badly failed. …

Both [Lillian] Hellman and Naipaul belong to that category of writer who consciously creates a personal myth. Hellman's was that of the tough, hard-drinking, hard-loving, morally uncompromising, independent “new woman.” Naipaul has fostered an image of the prototypical post-colonial man without a country, the permanent alien. “I am an exile,” he would intone lugubriously—and perhaps pretentiously—in Theroux's presence.

The images are superhuman, the real writers only too human. The younger writers, driven, I suspect, by professional jealousy, are eager to debunk the myths by exposing the mythmakers as being every bit as selfish, petty, and craven as the rest of us.

Ultimately it is a futile exercise. One of Naipaul's passionate beliefs was that, so far as literary merit is concerned, truth is the daughter of time: “That was his greatest strength, his unwavering belief that writing was fair—that a good book cannot fail, that it will ultimately be recognized as good; that a bad book will eventually be seen as junk, no matter what happens in the short run. Only the long run mattered. There was justice in writing.” He is probably right: in which case the pinpricks of a Theroux or a [Rosemary] Mahoney, however painful, will not make any difference in the end.

I suspect that Lillian Hellman was overrated during her lifetime, and that, the long run having begun, Mahoney's book [A Likely Story] is a manifestation of the refocusing process. In the next century, Hellman will not be considered a major author; but she will still be a significant figure in her period and will continue to have her fair share of readers. The jury is still out on Naipaul; I, for one, think him almost as fine a writer as he thinks himself, and that is high praise indeed.

Theroux's claim that there was no model or precedent for Sir Vidia's Shadow is correct, but the fact that it was so quickly followed by A Likely Story would seem to indicate that a new genre is in the making. That a reputable publisher like Doubleday would publish something as trashy as A Likely Story—and for all its recondite vocabulary and literary pretensions, trashy it is—means that this sort of very personal exposé is now considered generally acceptable, as it would not have been twenty years ago.