[Shiva Naipaul's] novels have dealt with a world where feeling has gone dead from despair and helplessness. He draws with the utmost precision a picture of the backwoods of Trinidad, and a people obsessed with the earnest, lifelong struggle to climb into the lower middle class. (p. 25)

Fireflies was a heavily documentary family saga, rather flatly constructed, but at the same time it was an utterly original book; the impression its abundant detail made was unforgettable. If Shiva Naipaul seemed never quite to get inside his characters, that is because he thought there was straw inside them. They were without some indefinable essential part of man. He wrote like a sociologist, unstylishly, at great length and with academic coldness. Still, for whatever reasons, Fireflies was a runaway success. It was certainly a most promising first book although it reads now as if it were written with suppressed passion...