Man of the World

Having won the Nobel Prize, V.S. Naipaul has long ago reached that stage in a writer’s career when anything he writes will be published. Sometimes, this is a good thing; freed from having to work for a “market”, the writer can stop writing for publishers and reviewers, that is, actual readers, and begin writing for the one person who counts: the imaginary, the ideal reader. More often, however, guaranteed publication is bad for a writer; it means he no longer feels the fruitful burden of having to perfect his thoughts for others, and becomes slack. And so the arrival of that much wished-for thing—artistic freedom—often coincides with decline, as the constraints which aided creation disappear, and as the writer’s early material, which can never really be replaced, is exhausted.

Though the age of the writer and the age of the man are not the same—it is possible for the one to be young and the other old, and vice-versa—it seems from his latest…