[In The Novel in the Third World, a] collection of essays on ten representative novels from Africa, India, the Caribbean, Papua New Guinea, and the Black and Native American communities in the United States, Larson proposes an evolutionary schema according to which third-world fiction can be defined in terms of its common characteristics, and not in terms of its relationship to Western literary models. Based primarily on narrative content, this schema distinguishes various stages in a process which has presumably repeated itself each time an European-American culture has sought to dominate non-Western peoples whose value systems are rooted in communal consciousness, a holistic view of history as cyclical recurrence, an inflexible attachment to traditional forms of behavior, and a propensity toward oral modes of story-telling.

The first stage in this process reflects an apparent death of the indigenous culture, a phenomenon that Larson considers pervasive in Maran's Batouala...