[V. S. Naipaul's essays in] "The Return of Eva Perón"] "meditate" on what he and Joseph Conrad would agree are "half-made societies," composed of those who are "prisoners of their cultures," trapped in "lunacy, despair."… [Naipaul] proves himself to be, incidentally, the best journalist of imperialism to have bothered to write in the English language. He is a kind of portable tree, who removed himself in order to invite lightning; by that brightness, he took notes on his own scars.

The "half-made" society, emotionally, is "parasitic"; it dreams of a "removed civilization," Europe. It apes the master even as it cuts the master's throat. A half-made society, historically, institutionalizes "a process of forgetting"; it substitutes legend and myth for fact and consequences. It consumes "the culture and technology of others." A half-made society sponsors "bad art" in "a country that hasn't really worked" because the redeemers who propose themselves are smuggled fakes; they believe their own publicity, as if they were Michael X or Eva Perón or Mobuto. According to Mr. Naipaul, there is no history in a half-made society, nor any archives: "there are only graffiti and polemics and school lessons."

Michael and Eva and Mobuto are graffiti. Their writing appears on the long walls. (p. 199)

Mr. Naipaul is telling us that our unseemly congress with dark continents, silent Indians, empty spaces and jungle rot has spawned monsters, centaurs who chew and think at the wrong ends of their artificial bodies. Our most peculiar language, politics, is a transplant that invents a new disease. (pp. 199-200)

Mr. Naipaul is obsessed with Conrad—"The Return of Eva Perón" concludes with an appreciation and an assessment that amounts to an autopsy—because Conrad, for all his faults, understood the "civilized crowd," the crowd that "believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion." In this sense, the crowd in a half-made society is not civilized; it has been obliged to borrow its morals and institutions; policemen and opinions are always available. The rest is role-play: Michael as Lenin, Eva as Mary, Mobuto as the Fisher-King. As they play their roles, Mr. Naipaul is watching because Conrad is dead and what other writer is there to complain of "missing a society"?…

Mr. Naipaul is the only great writer I know of—he is a great writer—for whom contempt is a familiar, a dybbuk. Like an owl or a cat, his contempt is on his shoulder, yellow-eyed. It is not the disdain of a Nabokov. Nabokov was equally severe, but Nabokov customized his own history. Mr. Naipaul wears our history, ready-made, off the rack, full of cats and owls that the inspector at the factory was too lazy to notice. These Michaels and Evas, ex-pimps and ex-prostitutes, came out of our factory. Mr. Naipaul understands them without forgiving.

"Nothing is rigged in Conrad," he says, and points to Conrad's "scrupulous fidelity to the truth of my own sensations." Nothing is rigged in Naipaul, either. He is our Conrad. A yellow-eyed god, he sees lunacy and despair. (p. 200)