Half a Life
By V.S. Naipaul. Alfred A. Knopf, 215 pages, $24.

Published in America a mere couple of weeks after he won the Nobel Prize, V.S. Naipaul’s latest novel twines all his major themes in an economical, swift-flowing narrative. An Indian Hindu Brahmin born of a poor family in Trinidad and educated on a scholarship at Oxford, Naipaul is twice exiled. And exile, displacement, has been his theme for almost 40 years. His novelistic terrain has been the Trinidad of his boyhood, the London of his young-adulthood, his travels in post-colonial Africa and the Caribbean, with side trips to the India of his ancestry.

Half a Life is the story of one Willie Chandran, who, in a typical Naipaul joke, was named for W. Somerset Maugham. Naipaul tells how Maugham visited India and met Willie’s father and subsequently became infatuated with Indian spiritualism. Willie’s father is a pundit by default: in an act of adolescent rebellion, he follows Mohandas Gandhi, burns his books, and pursues — stalks, actually — a woman of lower caste until he more or less traps himself into marriage with her. He reverts to the temple life to avoid the complications of his rebellion; the sacrifice, the silence, and the abstinence of religious life are portrayed as ritualized passive-aggression. When young Willie begins to write hateful stories about his father, the father responds, " I will deal with it in the way of the mahatma. I will ignore it. I will keep a vow of silence so far as he is concerned. "

Willie finds his way to London, to a school that fashions itself after Oxford and Cambridge. An alien in post-war London, he understands nothing — from the newspaper stories about the Suez crisis to the everyday customs of college life. He’s told that the gown that students wear on formal occasions are an imitation of Oxford and Cambridge — a "  ‘tradition’ that the teachers and students were proud of but couldn’t explain. " The gowns are supposed to derive from Roman togas, but Willie’s research reveals that they were probably copied from " Islamic seminaries of a thousand years before, and that Islamic style would have been copied from something earlier. So it was make-believe. "

Naipaul has been criticized for his impolitic depictions of post-colonialist society, where indigenous peoples imitate the customs of the colonizers and become parody. But Half a Life makes it clear that for him all culture is in a sense make-believe, whether the locale is Mozambique or Notting Hill. Everyone is a " half " man, a mimic (one of Naipaul’s early London novels is The Mimic Men, and the word crops up a few times in Half a Life).

Willie tries to find a place in the world. He falls in with the bohemian Notting Hill crowd of artsy immigrants and English literary types. Like Naipaul, he writes radio scripts for a while, then writes a book of stories. He gets a fan letter from a Portuguese-African woman who belongs to a landowning family. They hook up and Willie moves to Africa with her (an unnamed Portuguese colony, probably Mozambique). There he spends 17 years, an idle estate dweller, observing the country’s political disintegration.

Half a Life is oddly structured. We hear Willie’s father’s story as told to Willie in the first person. Then we move to Willie’s point of view in the third person. In the last third of the book, Willie tells of his years in Africa to his sister in the first person. Yet the story moves smoothly, and this gradually narrowing point of view that moves around Willie as a subject and finally to the " I " of the story’s protagonist has the effect of a tightening noose. The " I, " after all, is what matters. " I don’t stand for any country, " Naipaul is reported to have explained to the Nobel representative who called him in Wiltshire. Willie is left alone at the end of the novel, in midlife, a half man with half a life behind him, now poised to create himself — or lose himself completely.

Half a Life is by turns as funny as Naipaul’s most comic novels (Miguel Street, A House for Mr. Biswas) and as tough and brutal (especially in Willie’s discovery of his own sexual rapaciousness) as his most tragic (Guerrillas, A Bend in the River). His eye and ear for social strata, for capturing the make-believe of multiple societies and personal backgrounds, is as keen as ever. And so is his nose for comedy, whether in those Notting Hill living rooms or on long Sunday-afternoon lunches on an African estate. His rhythms, the particulars of his language (where the placement of " a blue Wood, Dunn butter tin from Australia " can suggest a world of feeling), are unerring. As unsparing in his assessment of other talents as of his own, Naipaul once complained that his literary soul mate, Conrad, " did not seek to discover; he only sought to explain. " At 69, Naipaul continues to discover.

Issue Date: October 25-31, 2001