If only Paul Theroux had consulted Dr. Laura Schlessinger. When she gets a call from someone who wants to know what to do about a new stepmother, recently married to a widowed or divorced father and now interfering with or even destroying the old intimacy of parent and child, her advice to the child in question is: “Honeybabe, don't pick a fight with the woman he's sleeping with.” Mr. Theroux is a clever man and often a good writer, but he could use a little of Dr. Laura's common sense. When his surrogate father, his literary father, Sir Vidia Naipaul, remarried two months after the death of his wife, Pat, in 1996, it should have been obvious that the thirty-year-old friendship between the two men was bound to change. Their half-lifelong intimacy had not included Nadira, the new Lady Naipaul (as she prefers to be called). Also, Theroux had been close to Pat and had even been asked by Vidia to write her obituary, which made another reason for the new broom to sweep him away.

Not long after the marriage, Theroux found inscribed copies of his own books which had been presented to Vidia and Pat Naipaul advertised for sale in a rare-books catalogue. He faxed without comment a copy of the catalogue page to Naipaul and received in return a note from Nadira accusing him of slights to and betrayals of the friendship. A further faxed appeal to Naipaul over his wife's head went unanswered. Finally, a year later, the two men met by chance in a London street. Naipaul had nothing to say to him but “Take it on the chin and move on.” But Theroux couldn't “move on.” Instead of listening to his son, who told him, “Dad, you're obsessing,” he decided to strike back by writing this book.

It was a bad decision, at least from a literary point of view. The soap-opera element to the story ensured that Sir Vidia's Shadow would be prominently reviewed and talked about; all this will probably translate into larger-than-usual sales. But it also means that the book cannot fight free of the banality of its origins. The final chapters are an embarrassment—full of self-pity, scatological barbs directed at the loathsome, “nightmarish” image of Lady Naipaul, and childish petulance toward Sir Vidia himself. “I had admired his talent,” writes Theroux. “After a while I admired nothing else. Finally I began to wonder about his talent, seriously to wonder, and doubted it when I found myself skipping pages in his more recent books. In the past I would have said the fault was mine. Now I knew that he could be the monomaniac in print that he was in person.”

Even if Naipaul were wrong about all the many things that Theroux suddenly discovered he was wrong about (“He was mistaken about so much”), Theroux was not the man to say so. The literary and intellectual judgment was tainted (a favorite Naipaul word) by his personal hurt and anger, as even the slightest degree of detachment from these feelings would have revealed to him. It is the more a pity because in its earlier chapters, before the bitterness predominates, the book offers a fascinating portrait of the plain V. S. Naipaul, whom Theroux knew as a fellow exile in post-independence, pre–Idi Amin Uganda in the mid 1960s, and thereafter mainly in England.

I am not one of those who think Theroux is guilty of “betrayal” for revealing, say, that his former friend once invited him, an impecunious freelancer, to lunch at the posh Connaught Hotel in London, ordered an expensive wine, and then stuck him with the bill—which came to something not far short of all the disposable money he had. Or that Sir Vidia accepted his knighthood after having ridiculed the very idea of such an honor for years. The portrait would not be worth having unless it came with warts and all, and Theroux is enough of a disciplined writer to show us a more attractive side of the wise, waspish, finicky little man whom he loved for so long.

In fact, had Vidia rather than Pat died in 1996, Theroux might have been the discount-store Boswell to his discount-store Johnson. He seems to have remembered their conversations in almost Boswellian detail and offers us many obiter dicta of an almost Johnsonian intelligence, if not wit. Naipaul as he is revealed in these pages is rarely brilliant and even more rarely funny, but he has a remarkable insight into people and politics and literature, and he is always honest and often profound. Above all, he stands fearlessly apart from intellectual fashion and political correctness. A lot of the embarrassment which is supposed to have accrued to him as a result of this memoir is owing to its reports of his occasional mild racial slurs or remarks like this one to Theroux's then wife, which Theroux now pretends to be horrified by: “I am speaking about this bogus feminism, the way it makes women trivial-minded … Women long for witnesses, that is all. Witnesses to their pleasure or their distress.”

Theroux's later accusations against his friend of misogyny have rather too much the sound of a goody two-shoes summoning the “gender” police in order to settle a private score. After the final snub he writes that he felt “liberated at last … He had freed me, he had opened my eyes, he had given me a subject.” In reality, Theroux is not “liberated” but cast into the intellectual prison of his own bitterness and hurt feelings, and an otherwise promising “subject” is spoiled as a result.