SOURCE: “To Be Without Roots,” in The Washington Post Book World, Vol. 5, No. 49, December 5, 1971, p. 22.

In the following review of In a Free State, Theroux calls the work a “masterpiece in the fiction of rootlessness” and compares the transplanted characters of the short stories to those in Naipaul's other works.

There are two sorts of intrepid travelers. The first are the travelers from a great and famous city or a prosperous country; they are made confident by the wealth of their home, they are emboldened by their history, their literature; they are calm, they travel to compare. Travel is part of their education, and an adventure. Once these travelers were Greeks and Italians, later Spanish and English; now they are mostly Americans.

The second sort, of which V. S. Naipaul (an Indian born in Trinidad and living now in England) is one, are the homeless. Many are former...