A BEND IN THE RIVER
By V. S. Naipaul
A Dark Vision
May 13, 1979
or sheer abundance of talent there can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses V. S. Naipaul. Whatever we may want in a novelist is to be found in his books: an almost Conradian gift for tensing a story, a serious involvement with human issues, a supple English prose, a hard-edged wit, a personal vision of things. Best of all, he is a novelist unafraid of using his brains--he would surely jeer at the common American notion that the exercise of mind saps a writer's vital juices. His novels are packed with thought, not as lumps of abstraction but as one fictional element among others, fluid in the stream of narrative.
