Closet classicist …

… Among the Barbarians: V. S. Naipaul and His Critics | The Hudson Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

A Writer’s People is about Naipaul’s genesis as a writer and of his personal struggles from not knowing to mastery of his craft. It is a story he frequently told, but told this time at a remove, reflected in the life of Gandhi. Like Gandhi, he also came of age far from the center of empire and, while initially ignorant of its institutions and culture, mastered its language and its ways. Although he was a native speaker of English, the Trinidad in which he grew up had no standard form, which is reflected in the English of his first two novels. The older members of his family spoke Hindi, but his father spoke good English, as can be seen in the letters they exchanged when Naipaul was a student at Oxford. These letters reveal the younger Naipaul to be an outsider striving to get in, as well as his ambition “to show these people that I can beat them at their own language.” In A House for Mr. Biswas, the point of view of the omniscient narrator is totally free of dialect. With that novel, Naipaul found a place in a tradition stretching back to Dickens, Balzac, and Tolstoy (three writers mentioned in A Writer’s People), not to forget Flaubert. But by the 1950s the world around such societies had changed, “had grown steadily larger,” and after Mr. Biswas, Naipaul struck out to look at and report on this larger world. Those reports were not well received in certain quarters.

Here is my review of Naipaul's Half a Life.