Professional Provocateur

In an age of mandatory multiculturalism and groupthink -- where well-intentioned but stale pieties stand in for close scrutiny on the left, and shrill but defensive assertions parade as rigorous criticism on the right -- it is altogether tonic to have a writer such as V. S. Naipaul in our midst. Throughout his long and prolific career, Naipaul, who was knighted in 1990 and awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 2001 (in a rare instance of merit triumphing over politics), has never bothered to check the cultural pulse before offering his blunt, often incendiary opinions. Although he has won the Booker Prize as well as various other British prizes and has lived in England since the age of 18, he continues to see himself as an outsider. ''I could not have done this writing in any other country,'' he explained in a recent interview. ''To that extent, I am a British writer.''

Naipaul's position is that of someone in a permanent state of exile who has never lost sight -- despite his success and the acclaim that has come with it -- of his precarious status as a minority within a minority. (Although, true to form, he has mocked the very notion of exile, questioning what it means ''in a world of cheap airfares'' where everyone ''can go home.'') He was born in 1932 and grew up in a large Indian family, the second of seven children, in the tiny and impoverished town of Port of Spain, Trinidad; his Hindu grandfather came over as an indentured servant. In 1950, Naipaul left for Oxford on a government scholarship and looked back rarely -- and then mostly in disdain. According to the letters that are collected in ''Between Father and Son,'' he endured the entrenched snobbery of university life by dint of gritty application (he set set himself to reading straight through chunks of literature: ''Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Donne, Marlowe, etc.'') and care packages from home (which typically included cigarettes as well as canned staples like sugar and juice). While still at Oxford he married a fellow student, whom he described grudgingly in a letter to his family as ''not unintelligent or altogether unattractive.'' (The unsung Pat, who died in 1996, would go on to suffer Naipaul's temper, infidelities, and general neglect -- he rarely made mention of her in his writing and usually left her home when he went anywhere grand -- in the name of her quiet belief in his genius.) Through sheer will and perseverance, living on the money he made from piecemeal assignments and his wife's income as a schoolteacher, Naipaul proceeded to hurl himself at the cliquish London literary world, turning out three novels before he was 30, and going on to cement his reputation with what many consider to be his best novel, ''A House for Mr. Biswas'' (1961) -- a tender and funny portrait based on his father, a struggling journalist who dreamed of literary glory. (V. S. Pritchett, usually the least parochial of critics, once described Naipaul as ''a brilliant chameleon from the Caribbean,'' and went on to note approvingly that unlike other novelists of color -- to use a designation neither writer would employ -- he knew his place: ''He feels his pain, but he is in command.'')

Yet although he is as entitled as anyone to claim the prerogatives of the disenfranchised, Naipaul has always eschewed the rhetoric of marginality. ''To be a victim,'' he has observed, ''is to be absurd.'' Possessed of a vigorous, casually elegant prose style and infinite curiosity, he has managed to elude every possible ideological niche while producing an extraordinary body of work -- 26 books in all, including almost equal amounts of fiction and non-fiction -- over the past 45 years. With his unbowed independence of mind, his pessimistic convictions about the inevitable abuse of power and the durability of human avarice, Naipaul has been a thorn in the side of bien-pensant types of every political stripe.

To be a cold victim is to be absurd.