SOURCE: Bawer, Bruce. “Civilization and V. S. Naipaul.” Hudson Review 55, no. 3 (autumn 2002): 371-84.

In the following essay, Bawer offers an overview of Naipaul's literary oeuvre and judges the author an ardent and eloquent defender of civilization.

Last December, on the day after being presented with the Nobel Prize for Literature, V. S. Naipaul sat down in Stockholm for a televised conversation with three fellow literary laureates, Günter Grass, Nadine Gordimer, and Seamus Heaney, and with Per Wästberg, a member of the Swedish Academy. One might have expected that the topic under discussion would be writing and literature, but the Nobelists soon turned to politics. Naipaul, alone in resisting this direction, protested that he is not political: he just writes about people. “Perhaps that's too frivolous,” he suggested slyly. Gordimer, perhaps failing to understand that there was more than a little irony in the air, and that...