Africa has become remote again, a mystery to be explained—at which point enter V. S. Naipaul with a book of wonderful authority and wisdom [A Bend in the River]. (p. 791)

In the sense that the narrative is conceived essentially as a political pageant in which a parvenu attempts to impose order on chaos, or rather a new chaos on the old. Naipaul's book might be said to be deficient in the conventional tensions of fiction. The interrelationships of the characters are nebulous, their development speculative; most of them are archetypes rather than individuals….

But the most ambivalent characters of all are the narrator, Salim, an Indian merchant; his inherited servant, Metty, and his old friend, Indar. They are Africans and yet not Africans; circumstances have pushed them inland from the rim of the continent, and they cling to their distinctive identity…. All of them move along among the locals conscious of the fact that they are neither assimilated nor have any real wish to be…. When Africa explodes, these people tell themselves and one another, they will be safe; this is not their struggle, and they will be somewhere else.

But where is somewhere else? In the last reckoning A Bend in the River is about homelessness. (p. 792)

The colossal experiment of the British Empire has left vast migrant populations; entire cultures are on the move, physically displaced, psychologically bewildered, and condemned to the worst kind of spiritual privation, which is to feel homesick without ever having had a home, to feel nostalgia for a nonexistent past…. [V. S. Naipaul's great gift] is to express complex ideas in clean, simple language. With the small particulars of a shopkeeper's life he has constructed a vast postimperial generality. Next time he glimpses those confused scenes of chaos on his TV screen, the reader of A Bend in the River will not feel quite so baffled. (pp. 792-93)