Half a Life by V. S. Naipaul

Willie Chandran and his sister Sarojini went to the mission school. One day one of the Canadian teachers asked Willie, in a smiling friendly way, "What does your father do?" It was a question he had put at various times to other boys as well, and they had all readily spoken of the degraded callings of their fathers. Willie wondered at their shamelessness. But now when the question  was put to him, Willie found he didn't know what to say about his father's business. He also found he was ashamed. The teacher kept on smiling, waiting for an answer, and at last Willie Chandran said with an irritation, "You all know what my father does." The class laughed. They laughed at his irritation and not at what he had said. From that day Willie Chandran began to despise his father.

Willie Chandran's middle name is Somerset, for the great English writer W. Somerset Maugham. Maugham, it seems, granted no small fame to Willie's father by describing him in a book as a famous ascetic who had taken in a vow of silence. In truth--as we learn from a story told to Willie by his father early in Half a Life--Willie's father took up the ascetic life more or life by accident. As a young man, he had been a follower of the Mahatma, and took up with a girl from an untouchable class in an act of social self-sacrifice. Far from shattering the caste system, the relationship scandalized both sides, and Willie's father was forced to flee to a religious life in order to escape their persecution. Willie is the offspring of this union, which has made his life unstable and uncertain, and for putting him in such a strange and impossible position he has learned to hate his father. Willie's father, fearing that rage and resentment will eat Willie up if he stays in India, writes to Maugham, who pulls a few strings to get him into an English university.

I was really struck by the elegance of Half a Life. Its three-part structure is sort of a marvel: first the first-person story told to Willie by his father, then the third-person section describing Willie's alienating experiences at university in London, and then a final first-person story told by Willie to his sister Sarojini about his fifteen years living in an unnamed African country with a wife he'd met at school. What becomes clear is that Willie has given three different places in the world a fair chance, and yet none of them has provided them with a sense of stability or belonging. This is the state of the colonized subject, and it's Naipaul's big subject, maybe never developed more fully than here in Half a Life. Willie can't thrive in India, caught between old ways and new ones, and he can't thrive in England, where his diminished status as a colonial make him a kind of outcast. In England he develops a budding writing ability that began as a child, and even publishes a book of stories about India, but they are little read and little appreciated, and he gives the passion up. Are we reading, perhaps, a story about the Naipaul that might have been?

In Africa, Willie returns to the colonized world, but not his own colonized world. There's a kind of logic to this--perhaps in Africa, Willie will be freed from the strictures of his own Indian background but also the repressive ideology of the British elite. But he finds himself embroiled again in the eternal tensions between the colonial power and the colonized, suffering through the smallness and pettiness of parochial Africans who can only assert their own value through their similarity to the Portuguese. Violence bubbles at the edge of the African city where he lives, and it's unclear whether, as a non-Portuguese outsider, Willie will be a target or be spared. When, one day, he slips and falls on the marble steps of his home, he wakes up in the hospital and announces to his wife he's leaving her. I can't, he tells her, live your life anymore; I must go and find my own. This leads him to Sarojini, a socialist rabblerouser who has needled Willie for his complacency by letter for years, and it's to her--the symbol of a new, untested, perhaps even more destabilizing approach--that he tells the story of his African life.

Willie Chandran's life is a failure three times over. In the end, he seems little different than the Africans who bounce between Africa and Portugal because neither can provide them a sense of fullness, though because of custom and language they can live nowhere else. It's a bitter book, maybe the most bitter of all Naipaul's books (although Guerillas come to mind) and rarely leavened with the kind of humor that enlivens A House for Mr. Biswas. Unlike Biswas, though, Willie Chandran is all too aware of his own shortcomings, and the impossibility of the kind of life that would provide dignity and belonging. I came away thinking this is one of Naipaul's most effective and effecting books.