It would be polite but ridiculous to talk about Shiva Naipaul as if he had leapt, full-armed and sui generis, into a literary world miraculously swept of all footprints of his famous brother V. S…. The relationship between the two is fraternal in much the same sense as that between Chekhov and Gorky. Like Chekhov, the elder Naipaul works from a fastidious, ironic private sensibility to humane public conclusions: because people behave badly, the world needs changing. The younger, more sweeping and less fastidious, starts where his brother ends: because the world needs changing, people behave badly. Bred within the old imperial culture, V. S. Naipaul sees its failure as one of individual wills, brains, imaginations. For his brother, born in 1945, it is the culture that blights the brains and wills. Like Gorky, he's fascinated by the perverse energies of primitive capitalism, the ferocious battling for a better...