[In the following review, King finds what he calls unexpected details included in the letters of Between Father and Son.]

The letters gathered in Between Father and Son are mostly between V. S. Naipaul, his older sister Kamla, and their father Seepersad Naipaul. The mother seldom writes and seems an outsider to their interests in writing, culture, and becoming independent from her wealthy but insulting family. In one of the last letters before his death, Seepersad remarks that he and his wife have never grown close. The other five children are younger, and a major theme of the letters is the conflict between devoting oneself to a future career, especially as a writer, and helping others in the family gain an education. This was a time in the British colonies when there was little public education and the way up the economic and social ladder was to earn a scholarship to one of a few elite schools, and then for the very few to win a scholarship to study abroad.

When the volume begins, Vidia has left for Oxford University, where he will study English, and Kamla is already at Benares Hindu University taking courses in Indian culture. They are both brilliant scholarship students but lonely, isolated, unaccustomed to life outside their extended family, a loneliness that will become worse as Vidia falls into a deep depression that lasts for most of his stay at Oxford and leads to months of breakdown, while Kamla becomes highly emotional, even unstable. They are often ill (Vidia suffers from asthma) and, along with their father, usually in financial trouble. They keep sending each other small sums that they cannot afford. They are also similar in having spending sprees to cheer themselves up. Vidia laments his thin coat in which he freezes and his old shoes which leak in the rain, and he never has money to repair his typewriter; but he brags of having tea every day at the most expensive hotel in Oxford. Those quirks of Naipaul's personality that have amused or angered others over the years were already present, and their causes are obvious, as is their model in his father, who, while always in debt, becomes obsessed with raising expensive orchids and who keeps asking for novels from England.

While the outlines of the Naipaul family story are known from his novels and autobiographical essays, the details are unexpected. There is Vido (the name he used until the British dubbed him Vidia), who was a good bowler at cricket, who enjoyed doing hard, day-long physical labor on farms during his university vacations, who arrived at Oxford unfamiliar with European three-course meals (which he describes to his family the way an American tourist might describe the conventions of traditional Indian eating), who was learning that in England one says “raincoat” instead of “cloak,” and who wanted to prove that he can write English better than the English can. There is Seepersad, who, while his son was at Oxford, was himself having his first short stories read on the BBC Caribbean Voices Program and who felt that if only he did not have a family to support he could become a writer, his main ambition in life; and there is Kamla, who is the one to return home to support the family after Seepersad has a stroke and dies, while a tougher Vidia announces that he has taken an English wife and that his first novel has been accepted for publication.