Compare and contrast:

V. S. Naipaul, from an interview with Rachel Donadio in last week’s New York Times Book Review (audio portion):

What I felt was that, if you spent your life just writing fiction, you were going to falsify your material … The novel, that business of making up narratives, making up stories, has done its work. It was very dominant in the 19th century in France and in England, and Russia, another important country, and then there was nothing more for the form to do. Forms have to change. In Shakespeare’s days people would be writing these plays in blank verse, and very soon after that they were writing plays in verse, and very soon after that they were writing plays in another way. Nothing stands still, everything has to move on. Every form which is living, has to move on, And to pretend you are going to be a writer in 2005 as though you were beginning in 1955 is utterly foolish. The world has changed. The forms have changed. There’s been a lot of work done.

B. S. Johnson, from the introduction to Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs? (1973):

Life does not tell stories. Life is chaotic, fluid, random: it leaves myriads of ends untied, untidily. Writers can extract a story from life only by strict, close selection, and this must mean falsification. Telling stories really is telling lies. [...]

Literary forms do become exhausted, clapped out, as well. Look what had happened to five-act blank verse drama by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth and Tennyson all wrote blank-verse, quasi-Elizabethan plays; and all of them, without exception, are resounding failures. They are so not because the men who wrote them were inferior poets, but because the form was finished, worn out, exhausted, and everything that could be done with it had been done too many times already. That is what seems to have happened to the nineteenth century narrative novel, too, by the outbreak of the First World War. No matter how good the writers are who now attempt it, it cannot be made to work for our time, and the writing of it is anachronistic, invalid, irrelevant, and perverse.

From Robert Birnbaum’s interview with Robert McCrum, biographer, novelist, memoirist, and literary editor of the Observer.

RB: You think so? Naipaul was quoted around the world as saying the novel is dead. [laughs]

RMcC: He’s entitled to say whatever he likes. He is the greatest living writer of English.

RB: You think?

RMcC: No question. He is supremely the greatest. I have no hesitation in saying he is above and beyond. So I think he has earned the right to say whatever he wants.

RB: [laughs]

RMcC: I know he causes trouble and is unpopular in certain quarters, but that’s absolutely fine.

After yesterday’s performance, I’m amazed that I went all day today without mentioning V. S. Naipaul. Let me remedy that immediately …

In Paul Theroux’s book Sir Vidia’s Shadow, Theroux describes meeting Naipaul in Kampala in the 1960s. Naipaul assures him that everything they see in East Africa is passing away: “All of it, back to bush.” He surprises Indian shopkeepers by asking what they plan to do when that happens; it’s clear by their reactions that none of them have considered the possibility.

I thought of this scene recently when I read about M. G. Vassanji’s novel The In-Between World of Vikram Lal, which won Canada’s Giller Prize last year and was published in the U.S. yesterday by Random House. It’s as if Vassanji picks up the scene precisely when Theroux leaves it, though the action takes place in Kenya rather than Uganda. The plot follows a member of the Indian community as Kenya descends into the corruption and chaos of the Kenyatta regime, and then later as he emigrates to Canada.

I’ve seen a few reviews – Washington Times and the Sunday Herald (Scotland) – but I expect we’ll see more. The August 26 review in the TLS (excerpt below) is the most positive: “an ambituous and enthralling work that takes in a broad sweep of Kenyan history.” Just a reminder: Vassanji will also be in Chicago on October 2 for a “books and brunch” session sponsored by the Canadian embassy. Reservations required, admission charge, but you get the book.

I’ve just come across Sunil Khilnani’s review of V. S. Naipaul’s Magic Seeds in the September 3 TLS (subsc only). It’s clear the book isn’t very good, but Khilnani does a nice job placing it in the context of Naipaul’s work. Half a Life was much the same: not successful (or even intermittently enjoyable) as a novel, but helpful in understanding the past work a little better.

It appears that the book incorporates the story “Suckers,” which appeared in the New Yorker earlier this year and which typifies the ugliness that’s overtaken Naipaul’s late work (and, some would say, his thinking). Ugly works can be great too, obviously; just not, so far, in Naipaul’s case.

From Khilnani’s closing paragraph:

Magic Seeds is an important enrichment of Naipaul’s oeuvre. But making sense of it is an uneasy business. It has been increasingly clear with his late fictions that we read them to hear the author’s voice, not those of his characters (how different it is to read A House for Mr. Biswas). This experience is undoubtedly powerful, but it yields a diminished sense of what the novel is for. Throughout the picturesque bleakness of Magic Seeds, we are shifted between Willie’s point of view — his is ostensibly the consciousness that holds the novel together — and that of an all-seeing narrator. In fact, Willie is interesting to us because of how Naipaul uses him: otherwise, he is a mental and moral wraith, a man of poses and petty wisdom pitiably won.

From an older piece in the Guardian, V.S. Naipaul on the fine art of the literary interview:

All the time, it’s false attribution, like Farrukh Dhondy on me sparring with James in 1950s London – it’s a fantasy… Please speak about these absurd things that are attributed to me. This comes of too many interviews. You know, the monkey goes away and gets it all wrong, and no one corrects monkey.

From V. S. Naipaul, “Our Universal Civilization,” in The Writer and the World (2002):

This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of civilization to so many outside or on its periphery. It is an elastic idea: it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectability and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.

An earlier version of this essay, delivered at the Manhattan Institute in 1990, is here.