[In 1965, Naipaul] writes that "to be a colonial is to be a little ridiculous and unlikely" and this is directly reflected in the clearly etched but on the whole gentle comedy about being an English-speaking East Indian from the West Indies, as numerous characters (including Naipaul himself) in Naipaul's early prose are. Having the language but with it a different tradition—like reading Wordsworth without ever having seen a daffodil, like the young Hindu in Port of Spain, Trinidad, who "takes up his staff and beggar's bowl and says that he is off to Benares to study"—is part of the same general discordance, "the play of a people who have been cut off."

There are many aspects of this fate which Naipaul has explored in autobiographical as well as fictional terms. His novels, for example, have developed the meanings lying coiled up in his own past, meanings...