Why You Need to Read A House For Mr. Biswas by V.S Naipaul
Hi there! First off, I want to say thank you to everyone who liked, subscribed, shared, and viewed. Honestly, your support means everything. Welcome to Retro Sunday, the Sunday edition of my Intellectual Sunglasses newsletter where I discuss culture, global trends, and some neat stuff in between. This is a special weekend edition in which I review a book initially published before 2005 and explain as lovingly as I can why they are worth reading. For copyright purposes, I won't be featuring any long quotations from the novels. This is just as well because they tend to distract from the conversation between reader and writer. These reviews are a little different from the stuff I put out on weekdays when I'm much more about what's going on in the world. So, find somewhere comfy, uncork some wine, and relax. And if you love what you read, you can click all the subscribe and share buttons at the end of the newsletter. Shall we begin?
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it. — V.S Naipaul.
V.S Naipaul was the brilliant outsider, who even though he quickly gained admittance into the highest echelons of society, resented those he encountered for their memberships which had not required significant effort and despised those still excluded for not being talented or worthy enough. In A House For Mr. Biswas, this petulant, arrogant alienation is given a colourful excess of detail and irony. A House For Mr. Biswas is a tragedy having a good time
The story opens with a series of prophetic announcements over the newborn child. Usually, such announcements bristle with an unfounded optimism over the prospects of the infant. Naipaul is aware of our expectations and slyly inverts them. The child, the prophet announces, will bring unhappiness and ruin. He will eat up his mother and father. He will be covetous. He will be reckless. He will be deeply dissatisfied. And so, immediately, the engine of the story has been cranked into gear. This will be a battle between destiny and determination, a sisyphean struggle to carve out one's place.
"How terrible it would have been, at this time, ... to have died among the Tulsis, amid the squalor of that large and disintegrating family; to have left Shama and the children among them in one room; or worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one's portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccomodated."
Stories about obsession rarely end happily. It is difficult to not trace here echoes of Ahab and the White Whale in Moby Dick and the furious futility of Ahab's quest for revenge. The distinction is Mr. Biswas' desires are more quotidian, more recognizable. The house represents more than anything, Biswas' own tangible deed of independence.
But none of his houses endure for long. The first house is swept away by fire. The second house is rather biblically consumed by flood. Mr. Biswas spends the majority of his existence in houses he does not like and houses he does not own. Hanuman House, the home of his in-laws, is a particular point of grievance. Throughout the novel, Mr. Biswas as mental insurance against these humiliations, makes long lists of his current possessions that resemble more glamorous sequences in Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night.
Indeed, we know more about the state and origin of the artefacts of these houses than we do about the children his wife keeps birthing to populate them. But they are both symbols of his ineptitude: the harder he strives for his independence, the more ardently he imprisons himself with his accumulations.
Shama, his wife, sees through the man. His in-laws, her family, do as well. Mr. Biswas talks a good talk but is very willing to sacrifice his goals on the altar of convenience. Sometimes, they play him against himself skillfully, sniping away at his pretensions. Other times, it is Biswas' own impatience which gets the better of him.
In one of the most charming sequences of dialogue in all of fiction, a prospector cum builder is invited to survey what Mr. Biswas hopes will be his next building site. Mr. Biswas is at this time in desperate financial conditions. The twist is the prospector is in equally similar straits. Thus, they commence an elegant duet of omissions and allusions.
Objections are raised ever so slightly in the same manner that a guilty student might lift her hands upon a request for identification by the principal. Three objections are permitted to drift away unanswered before they are resurrected all over again, only of course to be more quietly sidestepped as the reality of the situation reached a compromise with both parties' egos and desperation.
Naipaul, in this sequence but in several others as well, makes us witnesses to his great ear for dialogue. Unfortunately, he often squanders these gifts in a stream of bitter repartee. Some of the bitterness and condescension that ruined Naipaul's later work is clearly here, especially in the querulous relationship between Biswas and his in-laws. But they are kept in check by Naipaul's solidarity with his main character, and to a lesser extent, by his sympathy for the supporting cast.
Emma and Elizabeth, you suspect, are younger, more effervescent versions of Jane Austen, but Biswas is Naipaul in a way that few characters reflect their authors. There is a case and it has been made severally that A House For Mr. Biswas is a fictionalized biography of Naipaul's father. The clues are not hidden with any diligence: it is the same humble beginnings, the same fierce desire to make one's name in the face of severe limitations, the same failure to acquire this name.
But if Biswas is Naipaul's father, he is also Naipaul. The crucial difference is Naipaul ended up walking the talk. In the graceful flippancy of rap language, we would say the difference is Naipaul actually made it.
All of Naipaul's fiction then is shadowed with a piercing awareness of failure; all of his major characters are in one way or another an exercise in what occurs when expectation is defeated by reality. And yet even for those who did manage to meet these demands, we are subtly alerted to their costs. Naipaul, Indian by descent, Trinidadian by birth, misanthropic by nature, and misogynistic by choice, is all of these characters. He became the prodigal son who could not come home because he had easily surpassed those meagre achievements of those left behind. What he had left was estrangement.
It has been said in varying ways that Naipaul loathed his own people. The claim has strong evidence. The claim also misses the larger truth. Naipaul's loathing of his own people was really a love that had lost patience with its object, expectations that had weaned themselves of hope.
A House For Mr. Biswas then represents an important juncture in the evolution of Naipaul's Nobel Prize Winning career. It is the moment when his resentment is still finding its own feet.
"How terrible it would have been, at this time, ... to have died among the Tulsis, amid the squalor of that large and disintegrating family; to have left Shama and the children among them in one room; or worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one's portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccomodated."
Earlier, I quoted this passage but deliberately omitted the point at which it appears. It occurs at the end of the novel, with Mr. Biswas already a dying man at forty-six. Instantly, you understand something is not quite right here. This doesn't sound like triumph as much as failure that has been converted into consolation. It sounds, in that case, like all of us, as we take our memories and reconstruct them into narratives in which our mistakes are celebrated instead as insights for future experience, and in which our maturity is counted in regrets.
Fiction has recently begun a new trend towards seriousness, as though the primary duty of literature was to subject society, history, or culture to an x-ray examination. A House For Mr. Biswas offers an active and vital resistance, and an affirmation of literature's original obligation to delight and instruct at the same time.
It is tragic. It is comic. It is tragic because it is comic and comic because it is tragic. Naipaul instinctively knows that most humour is merely pain that has travelled further in time, away from its source. This entertaining account of one man's intense ambitions and the array of obstacles in his way is a tragedy having a good time. It gives any reader a good time as well.