THERE are “painterly” painters and there are “writerly” writers. The latter, at least, tend to be those to whose books you turn because you think they will be good for you, rather than in any expectation of pleasure. Fostered by hundreds of schools of “creative writing” in our universities, the academic style in modern American prose produces a huge domestic oversupply of writerly writing, so that you would hardly think it necessary for us to import it. In the case of V. S. Naipaul’s A Way in the World, however, there is an argument to be made for doing so.
Mr. Naipaul’s prose, though it is highly wrought, is never obscure or self-indulgent, and, though self-regarding, it is not self-obsessed. His own experience is of interest to him, as to us, only as it is used to illuminate a wide range of interest outside himself. In fact, even though he calls this book “A Novel” it is helpful to regard it as journalism or history instead, both because that would be a much more accurate description of it and because its claim on our attention rests with its wealth of factual material about the colonial and post-colonial history of Trinidad,
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