[Love and Death in a Hot Country], Naipaul's subtly crafted account of abandonment and degeneration in a thinly-veiled version of Guyana, focuses on two casualties of the new redemptive order, Dina and Aubrey St. Pierre, whose marriage is suffering its own parallel decline. Disgusted by the lavish promises of the electoral masquerade, the St. Pierres inhabit a political and psychological void between the vanishing past and the balloting's foregone conclusion. In divergent ways, their lives assume a frustration and incompleteness that obliquely but unmistakably reflects Cuyama's apparently hopeless course. (p. 20)

Naipaul's portrait of a nation coming apart before having a chance to take political or cultural shape is neither explosive or overtly dramatic. His is a vision of gradual decomposition, tautly revealed in personal histories, the rhythms of daily life and details of the landscape….

Love and Death in a Hot Country draws much of its inspiration from...