[ALBSA-Info] NYTimes.com Article: 'Half a Life': Postcolonial Studies

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'Half a Life': Postcolonial Studies

October 28, 2001 

By MICHAEL GORRA


 

THE later years of a writer's career are often a reprise of
the first, a final version of the concerns and questions
that shaped his earliest books. Hemingway went fishing once
more and Evelyn Waugh made Basil Seal ride again; Goethe in
his 80's finished the ''Faust'' he had begun in his 20's.
For V. S. Naipaul, such a last act would seem to have begun
early, in the very middle of middle age. Virtually all his
work since the 1984 ''Prologue to an Autobiography'' has
burnished the shield of his own myth, revisiting the scenes
of his earlier travels, recapitulating the story of how he
stepped from colonial Trinidad into the history of English
literature. He has told that tale so often that even he
must have felt the need for a new kind of curtain call, and
now, at just short of 70, he might well have found it. With
the curious palimpsest of ''Half a Life,'' V. S. Naipaul
has again begun to write novels. 

But as a form, the novel is dead. Or so this year's Nobel
laureate himself has said, telling interviewers that it
exists today only as a commercial ''extravaganza,''
claiming that he can ''no longer understand why it is
important to write or read invented stories.'' And
uncharitable critics, of whom he has always had many, have
linked those statements to Naipaul's own reluctance, after
''A Bend in the River,'' to write another one himself. Two
of his intervening books have been called novels, but
nobody outside a marketing department has ever found that
an adequate description of either ''The Enigma of Arrival''
or ''A Way in the World.'' Those first-person flirtations
with the borders of genre may include elements of fiction,
but they owe much more to autobiography and the essay; they
are ''novels'' only in the cant sense in which the word is
now used to describe any long work of imaginative prose. 

Naipaul has suggested that such books -- and ''The Enigma
of Arrival'' stands with his greatest -- obviated his need
for the disguise of ''a character who roughly has my
background,'' who could carry his voice and experience.
''Half a Life'' has such a character, and one can only
speculate as to why Naipaul has returned to the form he
once discarded. For, on closer inspection, this new book
isn't as different from his other, less clearly fictional
late work as it first seems: it too comes so marked by the
pentimenti of his earlier books that it's hard to imagine
what someone new to him might make of it. 

''Half a Life'' is built like a sandwich, with the
first-person narrations of the Chandrans, father and son,
serving to hold a third-person filling in place. The book
opens in a newly independent India with the nameless
father's attempt to answer his son Willie's questions.
''Why is my middle name Somerset?'' the boy asks one day,
and his father answers ''without joy'' that the child is
named for ''a great English writer.'' And so he begins to
explain: ''It took a long time. The story changed as Willie
grew up.'' In one version, the father is ''doing penance''
and living under a ''vow of silence''; in a later one, the
vow is a pose, a pretense of holiness designed to stave off
a charge of corruption. Whatever its motive, that silence
attracts the attention of a touring Somerset Maugham; it
seems almost impossible to pick apart the laminated irony
in that choice of a ''great'' writer. And eventually,
Willie's father says, ''foreign critics began to see in me
the spiritual source of 'The Razor's Edge.' '' But the
book's popularity imprisons him in what had been a
temporary role, and when his story is over his son simply
says, ''I despise you.'' 

The father's narrative is both the briefest and the
freshest section of ''Half a Life,'' written with a
compressed eloquence for which understatement seems too
weak a word. Still, anyone familiar with Naipaul's work
will recognize the Chandrans' situation as a bitter echo of
certain moments in his early comic fiction, will understand
the fraught relations between father and son in particular
as a grim revision of ''A House for Mr. Biswas.'' That
sense of something heard before dominates the book's next
section, a third-person chronicle of Willie's immigrant
adventures in the lonely London of the 1950's. 

For in Britain Willie soon begins to put together a
sequence of short stories, tales placed against the
''vague'' background of ''a palace with domes and turrets,
a secretariat'' as well as ''a hermitage with an unreliable
holy man.'' The work comes quickly, too quickly, and its
emotions are faked, lifted from the climactic moments of
Hollywood films like ''High Sierra.'' Both the simplified
background and the speed with which Willie writes do,
however, recall Naipaul's description of his own work on
the stories that became ''Miguel Street.'' And so does the
reference to ''High Sierra,'' starring Humphrey Bogart --
whose name Naipaul lifted for one of that early book's most
memorable characters. This buried reference to his other
work makes the character seem like an alternate version of
Naipaul's own past, and suggests once more how precarious a
start he had, how easily he might have failed. Perhaps what
has drawn him back to the novel is just that chance to test
out the other ways in which a character with ''roughly . .
. my background'' might have developed. 

Naipaul is surely entitled to that self-referentiality, one
more common to poets than novelists; nevertheless, that
aspect of ''Half a Life'' will remain unavailable to anyone
who hasn't steeped himself in Naipaul's earlier accounts of
this period -- though maybe that inaccessibility wouldn't
matter if the rest of Willie's London experience were
handled with the rich, suggestive detail of ''The Enigma of
Arrival.'' Willie becomes ''part of the special, passing
bohemian-immigrant life'' of a city in which people like
him are ''still new and exotic.'' Yet Naipaul's depiction
of that world seems oddly secondhand, marked by disjointed
vignettes and social history crammed into set speeches. In
one such speech a publisher makes a tiny mistake in
summarizing Thackeray's ''Vanity Fair.'' Is that the
subtlest of ways to make us distrust the character or --
one hardly dares ask -- is the author himself in error? 

The novel's much stronger last section moves back into the
first person, only this time it's Willie's turn to offer an
apologia. He has talent but no sense of vocation. His one
book leads not to a literary career but to an
''international'' marriage and his subsequent move to
colonial Africa, where his wife, Ana, owns a plantation in
Portuguese-controlled Mozambique. Once more Naipaul appears
to be wandering through the scenes of his own career. The
place is recognizably the same as the East African
highlands of his Booker Prize-winning ''In a Free State,''
or rather, seen with the same degree of conscious
abstraction, an entire continent conjured out of a few
details: ''the fantastic rock cones, the straight asphalt
road and the Africans walking.'' Yet this Africa lacks the
terror of the one Naipaul had earlier described. It has its
politics and guerrilla movements, but everything seems
muted, even washed out. Gradually, one realizes that
Naipaul is trying something different, that his interest
lies in the dailiness of this late colonial world, not its
postimperial crises. 

And in the book's last moments a narrative that has seemed
to meander pulls suddenly tight, giving ''Half a Life'' an
interest that lies beyond its relation to Naipaul's other
work. It wouldn't be fair to quote the words, but the
novel's concluding sentences both lend its title an extra
point and make Willie's story dovetail with his father's.
The very fissures in its structure, its change from voice
to voice, transform ''Half a Life'' into a meditation on
the difficulties of building a coherent self, suggesting
that there is always an unrealized and true self that
remains separate from the conditions under which we live.
Once Willie comes, in his 40's, to understand that, the
book just stops: a novel both sawed off and finished, half
a life but with no promise of any more to come. 

Naipaul underplays that conclusion, and yet it seems as
disquieting as anything he has ever written, a moment that
suggests the almost invisible care with which, at its best,
this book is made. His terse prose works, as always, to
imply a world in a phrase: an Indian professor tests ''our
knowledge of his notes,'' and in Africa, Ana and her
neighbors have inherited their friends along with the
estate. (''We all came with the land.'') In a preface to a
1983 edition of ''A House for Mr. Biswas,'' Naipaul wrote
that he had ''no higher literary ambition than to write a
piece of comedy that might complement or match this early
book.'' ''Half a Life'' is too patchy for that. But it is
good to have him writing novels once more, the newest act
in the career of a writer who has never quite repeated
himself no matter how often he's relied on the same few
songs. 



Michael Gorra is the author of ''After Empire: Scott,
Naipaul, Rushdie.'' He teaches English at Smith College.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/28/books/review/28GORRAT.html?ex=1005290015&ei=1&en=2ef5b64239af8752



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