It is hard not to note a certain turning in the air when V. S. Naipaul is mentioned, a hint of taint, a suggestion of favor about to go moot. He has become a question, as in "the question of Naipaul." One catches the construction "brilliant but": brilliant but obsessive, brilliant but reductive, brilliant but so dazzled by the glare off his particular circumstance—the Indian not an Indian, the Trinidadian not a Trinidadian, the Englishman never an Englishman—that he stays blind to the exigencies of history….

When writers are very celebrated they are of course more likely to elicit negative comment than when they are not, but the rush to categorize Naipaul is interesting, and seems to derive from more than just the predictable arc of a reputation….

[In The Return of Eva Perón] Naipaul dwells obdurately (obsessively, reductively) on a landscape that is presumed to comfort the forces of reaction. He renders societies in which the dynamic of change opens new frontiers only for opportunists, "half-made societies … doomed to remain half-made." He insists that "the corruption of causes" is intrinsic, built in, the logical extension of the rhetoric itself. He persists in translating underdeveloped into underequipped, undone by imported magic and borrowed images, metaphors, fantasies and applauded lies, fairy tales. He posits what has been the controlling historical trope of our time—the familiar image of the new world emerging from the rot of the old, the free state from the chrysalis of colonial decay—as a fairy tale, a rhetorical commodity, and his contempt for those who trade in it is almost total.

I say, "almost" because Naipaul reserves a kind of tragic sympathy for the buyers of such rhetorical commodities, for the importers and ultimate victims….

The story of Michael Abdul Malik, or Michael X, born Michael de Freitas in Trinidad in 1933, was for Naipaul one of those dense situations in which a writer finds his every concern refracted….

In view of Malik's derangement the words "revolution, change, system" are of course seen by Naipaul as "London words, London abstractions," and in his account of the killings in Trinidad it is ultimately these London words that kill not only Gale Benson and the other casualties of Malik's fantasy but Malik himself. "Malik thought he shared the security of his supporters," Naipaul observes of Malik's London career. "He failed to understand that section of the middle class that knows only that it is secure, has no views, only reflexes and scattered irritations, and sometimes indulges in play: the people who keep up with 'revolution' as with the theater … the people for whom Malik's kind of Black Power was an exotic but safe brothel."

It is toward precisely this section of the secure middle class, toward the exporters rather than the importers of the rhetoric, that Naipaul directs the profound disgust that he is sometimes accused of feeling for the victims of the words, for the casualties of the abstractions, for the Maliks of the "emerging" world. He keeps a kind of terrible track. He lets no one off….

This entire narrative about the killings in Trinidad, the situation Naipaul later rendered into fiction as Guerrillas, exists as a way of wishing bad cess not to Malik but to "all those who helped to make Malik … those who continue to simplify the world and reduce other men …". (p. 20)

[Naipaul] is a writer for whom the theoretical has no essential applicaton, for whom a theory or an ideology is superficial to the phenomenon it attempts to describe, something no more than a scaffolding, something to be "erected" or "demolished"; something "imposed" (a word Naipaul often uses in relation to ideas) on the glitter of the sea, the Congo clogged with hyacinth, the actual world.

The actual world has for Naipaul a radiance that diminishes all ideas of it. The pink haze of the bauxite dust on the first page of Guerrillas tells us what we need to know about the history and social organization of the unnamed island on which the action takes place, tells us in one image who runs the island and for whose profit the island is run and at what cost to the life of the island this profit has historically been obtained, but all of this implicit information pales in the presence of the physical fact, the dust itself.

This stunning, even numbing, physical immediacy in Naipaul is hard to overlook, but many people do. In The New York Times Book Review not long ago, Jane Kramer referred to Naipaul's work as "a topography of the void," [see excerpt above] and I wonder if it has not become common to confuse a view of the world one does not find personally encouraging with "the void" itself…. The world Naipaul sees is of course no void at all: it is a world dense with physical and social phenomena, brutally alive with the complications and contradictions of actual human endeavor….

This world of Naipaul's is in fact charged with what can only be described as a romantic view of reality, an almost unbearable tension between the idea and the physical fact, and it is this tension in himself that Naipaul acknowledges in reading Conrad. In the piece about Conrad that ends The Return of Eva Perón, he talks about a time when he began to "ponder the mystery—Conradian word—" of his own Trinidadian background, his own relation to "that island in the mouth of a great South American river," and he recalls having had the sense "that those of us who were born there were curiously naked, that we lived purely physically." This was a sense he had trouble explaining, even to himself…. The sense of a world as a physical fact without regret or hope, a place of intense radiance in which ideas may be fevers that pass, suggests a view of human experience that now seems less than comforting to many people, but the view is Naipaul's, and I suspect it to be the long one. (p. 21)