Finding Identity In Life's Margins.(Half a Life)(Review)

The title of V. S. Naipaul's first novel in seven years, "Half a Life" (Knopf), is somewhat misleading. The slim volume speaks more of half- and-half lives--characters shaped by their postcolonial contexts, of middling rank and divided loyalties. At first they can seem emblems of the crude certainties for which, in his nonfiction, the author is known and often justly criticized: these are wounded people from wounded civilizations, deformed by the sanctities of caste and unfit for modernity.

At least that seems to be the lesson of the tale that Willie Chandran's father tells him to open the novel--the story of how Willie received the middle name Somerset (after the British writer Maugham) and of how his father arrived at his disillusioned state. A Brahman destined for a good marriage and comfortable government job, Chandran pere finds himself both paralyzed by his circumstance and tugged by the great currents roiling the Indian independence movement. He decides to rebel. But he stumbles into and almost instantly regrets even this transgression: he marries a dark-skinned "backward," in answer to Gandhi's call to break down caste barriers. "At this moment of supreme sacrifice I fell, as if by instinct, into old ways," he says, taking up life as a Brahman priest. The true evidence of his rebellion is his half-and-half son, stripped of heritage by the conflicting claims of mother and father.

That Willie despises his father for his deracination is made clear in a school composition that the rest of the novel--the rest of his "half life"--is spent rewriting. The allusion is literal: after he moves to London and takes up writing, one of his first stories is a revision of this first text. Naipaul, however, is not so simplistic. Willie's story bears similarities to the ...