Quotes of the Day

"Tell the truth," V.S. Naipaul advised the young Paul Theroux in the mid-1960s, when the latter asked him how to get started as a novelist. As contradictory as that might seem — novelists make things up for a living, after all — anyone who has written fiction, or even tried to tell a convincing lie, knows exactly what Naipaul meant. The best tales have the air, feel and smell of authenticity about them, and the paradoxical aspect of good fiction is this honesty.

From his very first book — 1957's The Mystic Masseur, about a deceitful guru — a dislike of fraudulence and "mimic men" has run through Naipaul's corpus, as it apparently does through his latest book, A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling. Naipaul's intention with this slim volume of essays is the continued unmasking of artifice and fabrication — not in a character or a society, but this time in writing. "There is a specificity to writing," Naipaul believes. "Certain settings, certain cultures, have to be written about in a certain way ... You cannot write about Nigerian tribal life as you would write about the English Midlands."

That's hardly a profound point, whether you agree with it or not, but it does set the tone for what follows. Both the Naipaul fan and the general reader will turn the pages of A Writer's People with mounting dismay, not simply because it compares poorly with his previous work — the slow waning of which has been well documented — but because it indulges Naipaul's famous petulance to such an extent that the man himself fails at looking and feeling, whatever his book's subtitle might be. In place of truth-telling, he has substituted superciliousness and spite.

Part memoir, part literary tutorial, the book begins with his recollections of Derek Walcott, a fellow Nobelist and West Indian writer whose first volume of poems was published in 1948. Naipaul came across it in 1955, while working part-time on a BBC radio program called Caribbean Voices. Although Naipaul says he broadcast everything Walcott submitted to the show, he also claims to have done so believing that "the first flush" of Walcott's inspiration had gone, and that the poet "was now marking time." Walcott's borrowing of Western European literary forms is peevishly dismissed as "falsifying" and his later career pooh-poohed with a donnish sneer: "A wonderful new black voice in the United States ... called out from the islands to teach in American universities."

Naipaul is no kinder about other writers such as the English novelists Graham Greene and Anthony Powell, the Trinidadian novelist Sam Selvon, or the Bengali pundit and essayist Nirad Chaudhuri, all of whom were his contemporaries. Greene's The Quiet American is dismissed because it presumed a knowledge of Indo-Chinese politics and Naipaul imperiously claims to not be in the habit of reading the newspapers. Anthony Powell was a good friend — in fact, during the 1950s he helped the young and ambitious Naipaul secure work as a book reviewer for the British magazine the New Statesman, and displayed an avuncular warmth that Naipaul warmly recalls. But Naipaul now conducts a shameful hatchet job on his late benefactor's reputation, depicting him as the plodding ham of English drawing-room novelists and wondering if their friendship lasted "because I had not examined his work." Sam Selvon he boasts of having insulted face-to-face during a BBC radio interview, by referring to one of Selvon's books as "wretched." And Nirad Chaudhuri, in perhaps the least acerbic assessment, is dismissed as a pedant better suited to academia.

Writers from earlier periods fare a little better, but not much. Naipaul is a fan of the early Flaubert, whose lightness of touch he admiringly notes in Madame Bovary, but whose later heavy-handedness (in works such as Salammbô) Naipaul describes with rather laborious detail himself. So who does Naipaul like? Maupassant, Twain and "the Russians (with the exception of Turgenev)."

It's a list as miserly and pretentious as the spirit that drew it up. Indeed, working through A Writer's People is rather like listening to the postprandial monologue of a cantankerous old guest at a literary dinner. One is at first amused by all the iconoclasm: After all, why should the reputations of Powell or Chaudhuri matter these days? One then begins to demur: Is Philip Larkin really a "minor" poet? Is the Caribbean really a place of "spiritual emptiness"? Finally one balks completely — at Naipaul's tiresome insistence on referring to the black population of Trinidad as "Negroes," for example, or at his relentless tone of acidity and disdain (India has "no autonomous intellectual life;" both the BBC and Oxford are "provincial and mean and common").

The central puzzle of A Writer's People, in the end, is the unimportance of people to the author of it. The pages are littered with names (Kingsley Amis drinking in London's Fleet Street, or Aldous Huxley watching Gandhi make a speech in India, or Naipaul discussing the Greek playwright Menander with former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan) but names are all that most of them remain — two-dimensional also-rans in Naipaul's literary one-upmanship. The laughing, exuberant and fleshed-out characters that were such a feature of his earlier work have got up from the table, it seems, leaving the old curmudgeon talking to himself.

• Neel Chowdhury