[In 1965, Naipaul] writes that "to be a colonial is to be a little ridiculous and unlikely" and this is directly reflected in the clearly etched but on the whole gentle comedy about being an English-speaking East Indian from the West Indies, as numerous characters (including Naipaul himself) in Naipaul's early prose are. Having the language but with it a different tradition—like reading Wordsworth without ever having seen a daffodil, like the young Hindu in Port of Spain, Trinidad, who "takes up his staff and beggar's bowl and says that he is off to Benares to study"—is part of the same general discordance, "the play of a people who have been cut off."

There are many aspects of this fate which Naipaul has explored in autobiographical as well as fictional terms. His novels, for example, have developed the meanings lying coiled up in his own past, meanings which, like the verbal ambiguities in the word "Indian," don't easily go back to some unquestioned origin or source….

Yet the possibility of anger, desperate bewilderment and bitter sarcasm has always lurked in Naipaul's work, because the possibility derived as much from his compromised colonial situation as it did from what, as a result, he wrote about. His subject was extraterritoriality—the state of being neither here nor there, but rather in-between things … that cannot come together for him; he wrote from the ironic point of view of the failure to which he seems to have been resigned.

Beginning in the early 1970s, however, this in-betweenness occasioned an increasingly bitter and obsessive strain in Naipaul's writing. (p. 522)

Whether the sense of consequently being locked into a world of reflections and inauthentic replicas rests principally for Naipaul on a metaphysical or a political discovery is not an answerable question: what is certain, to the reader of Guerrillas (1975) and India: A Wounded Civilization (1977), is that politics and metaphysics support each other. Quite deliberately in the process he becomes a peregrinating writer in the Third World, sending back dispatches to an implied audience of disenchanted Western liberals, not of presumably unteachable colonials. Why? Because he exorcises all the 1960s devils—national liberation movements, revolutionary goals, Third Worldism—and shows them to be fraudulent public relations gimmicks, half native impotence, half badly learned "Western" ideas. Most important, Naipaul can now be cited as an exemplary figure from the Third World who can be relied on always to tell the truth about it. (p. 523)

There isn't real analysis in his essays, only observation, or to put it differently, he does not explain, he only regrets sarcastically. His novels are of a piece with this. A Bend in the River takes place in an Africa drenched in memories of departed colonialists replaced by an invisible Big Man whose doings are unreservedly irrational and gratuitous. In the meantime he manages to unsettle a small group of hybrid Indian Moslems like Salim, the novel's sensitive protagonist, who, with no place to go and nothing to do, see the world taken over by rich Arabs and ridiculous savages. For his portrait of "wounded" India, Naipaul resorts to an almost hysterical repetition of how the place has no vitality, no creativity, no authenticity; read the book's last half and you will not believe that this, in its turgid denunciations of a poor country for not measuring up, is the great Naipaul everyone has been extolling. (pp. 523-24)

So great has the pressure of Western ideas become in Naipaul that any sympathetic feelings he might have had for the things he sees have been obliterated [in the essays of The Return of Eva Peron]. There is no life in what he writes about—only hard "lunacy, despair." What is not European can only be borrowed from Europe, further enforcing colonial distortion and dependency. (p. 524)

Finally, Naipaul reads Conrad (who "had been everywhere before me") so as to allay his "political panic." Here was an author who had seen "the new politics [of] half-made societies that seemed doomed to remain half-made." Conrad was "the writer who is missing a society," like Naipaul himself; yet unlike today's novelists he did not give up his "interpretive function" when "the societies that produced the great novels of the past [had] cracked." He goes on meditating, again like Naipaul, on peripheral societies making and unmaking themselves. But what Naipaul does not see is that his great predecessor exempted neither himself nor Europe from the ironies of history readily seen in the non-European world…. No one can draw a self-bolstering European patriotism out of Conrad and claim at the same time to be reading what Conrad actually wrote.

That Naipaul does so in effect tells us more about him and his blocked development than any confession. He is in the end too remarkable and gifted a writer to be dismissed…. The more interesting questions are when will his fundamental position become clear to him and when, consequently, will he see himself with less bad faith than he now sees himself and his fellow colonials. Whether that vision can in his case produce a good novel is not exclusively an esthetic puzzle, just as whether he will then amuse the audience that now regards him as a gifted native informer is also not mainly an esthetic question. But he will, almost certainly, come to fuller appreciation of human effort and he will be a freer, more genuinely imaginative writer along the way. (pp. 524-25)