Book Review: Cultural Studies

Bigger-Than-Life Lives

The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul

by Patrick French Knopf, 576 pp., $30

It's not news, exactly, but the literary world of the 20th century has been rife with antagonism. Hemingway brutalized Fitzgerald; Norman Mailer brutalized nearly everybody else. Still, from the stories told of V.S. Naipaul, his venomous misogyny and distinctly unsympathetic views on postcolonial nations already established, only a madman would want to tangle with the Nobel-winning novelist, essayist, and provocateur. You'd have a better chance winning a wrestling match with a giant squid. However, British journalist and biographer Patrick French works some serious juju of his own in his new warts-and-all biography of Naipaul.

Born in 1932 in Trinidad as a member of colonial India's diaspora (India gained independence in 1947), Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul longed to escape the island nation early on. He soon won a prestigious scholarship to Oxford University in England, where he met his first wife, Patricia Hale, and struggled with bouts of self-doubt and depression. Another decade passed before Naipaul's most famous novel, A House for Mr. Biswas, brought him international acclaim. In 1971, Naipaul was the first author of Indian descent to win the Booker Prize (for In a Free State). With his polyglot Indo-Trinidadian heritage, his controversial accounts of visits to India and Africa also made history.

French comes to this assignment well-prepared. A powerful writer in his own right, he has published a nonfiction account of the life and times of the Victorian explorer Sir Francis Younghusband and a pair of outstanding, perceptive books on Indian history and Tibet's struggle for independence. Turning his attention to a living, contemporary subject may have been daunting, but French never shows his nerves. He is gracious, funny, and honest. In a remarkable coup, considering that Naipaul himself contacted French to write this "authorized" biography, French highlights Naipaul's cruelty to his first wife and his 24-year, often brutal affair with Margaret Murray. French also offers an account of Naipaul's famously sour relationship with Paul Theroux.

"The best a biographer can hope for is to illuminate the aspects of a life and seek to give glimpses of the subject, and that way tell a story," writes French. To to his credit, this sprawling, fascinating biography does that and more; no matter what Naipaul might say.

Additional Reading: Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by H.W. Brands (Doubleday, 896 pp., $35); Casanova: Actor Lover Priest Spy by Ian Kelly (Tarcher, 416 pp., $28.95)