SOURCE: "Naipaul's Written World," in The Hudson Review, Vol. XLVII, No. 4, Winter, 1995, pp. 587-96.

In the following essay, Pritchard argues that Naipaul's "decline as a novelist" can be attributed to his "banishment" of irony and humor in his later works.

V. S. Naipaul's twenty-second book is an occasion for looking over his extraordinary career and considering how much it weighs and what parts of it weigh most. That he hasn't yet won the Nobel Prize is continuing matter for speculation and doubtless has to do with his outspoken airings of prejudices that are insufficiently liberal. Reviewing the new book's predecessor, The Enigma of Arrival (1987), Derek Walcott—a Nobel winner—both praised it as writing and deplored Naipaul's disdainful attitudes toward black people and the West Indian world. Even so, said Walcott, Trinidadians had large enough hearts to forgive him for choosing England as the place of authority and...