V.S. Naipaul's Other Life

While Pat, his adoring and self-sacrificing wife of 40 years, was on her deathbed, V.S. Naipaul was zipping around Pakistan with a new, much younger companion, angry, as she later reported, that his wife "was not dying fast enough because he wanted to carry on with his life." The day after Pat's cremation, he brought the younger woman into their home to be his second wife. "Would you say you have had a happy life?" the Nobel-winning novelist records asking Pat in his diary. "No direct answer," he writes. "It was perhaps my own fault," comes her faint reply.

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Such shocking moments--and startling candor--are everywhere in The World Is What It Is (Knopf; 554 pages), a biography of Naipaul by the British writer Patrick French that is as haunting and harrowing a psychological document as you could ask for. Telling the life of the famously exacting writer has long seemed a daunting prospect, not least because he has written so often and with such unsparing honesty about his ambitions and insecurities. But French pursues his prey with an acuity worthy of the man himself. That this unsettling record is an authorized biography says something impressive about both writer and subject. (See the 100 best novels of all time.)

The particular achievement of The World is to flesh out the two potent forces that Naipaul has often seemed to repress: women and Trinidad, where he grew up. The abstemious Brahmin vegetarian who looked away from the movie screen whenever a kissing scene was shown, even after his marriage, is here revealed as a writer of wildly sensual letters whose mistress of 24 years called him "the Lion King" and drew sketches of his manhood in all its naked glory. That did not stop him from seeing her through three abortions and being, in his alarming words, "very violent with her for two days with my hand," but it does bring home how women could see something redeeming and inchoate beneath the mask of a curmudgeon who seemed determined to play Evelyn Waugh in brownface.

Even more surprising is to see Naipaul as a boy showing off for girls with his acrobatics and singing "Ol' Man River" as he darns his socks. Much of his mischief and provokingness he got from his Caribbean origins, he acknowledges; and to see the calypso Naipaul before he began taking snuff from a silver spoon is to see a much more human and endearing figure than the master usually admits to.

Excavating Pat's diary and the writer's own journal and talking to more than a hundred people on several continents, French grippingly develops an account of the writer's life as cool and undeluded as Naipaul's former friend Paul Theroux's was rivetingly emotional. Though he remains deeply sympathetic to Pat, who gave herself over without complaint to a man she was convinced was a genius, French is otherwise as plainspoken as his subject: the critic Clive James is "an ill-favoured Australian humorist." Naipaul's second wife Nadira he calls "dyslexic, emotional, fairly scandalous."

The central question the book raises is how much inhumanity is justified in the cultivation of a talent--especially in an age when (as Naipaul is shrewd enough to realize) writers are judged on the basis of their personality more than their art. Even as he turned himself into a bespoke English gentleman, after all, while Pat became the obedient and self-denying Indian wife of legend, Naipaul's strength lay not just in the clarity of his observations but in the passion--the grief and terror and rage--that trembled just beneath them. When Pat finally died, in 1996, French tells us, her husband leaned against a car, weeping uncontrollably, as her ashes were scattered. He knew--such is his tragedy and his power--all that he had done, and all that he had lost.

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