A House for Mr. Biswas.

Lying in the room next to Shama’s, perpetually dark, Mr. Biswas slept and woke and slept again. The darkness, the silence, the absence of the world enveloped and comforted him. At some far-off time he had suffered great anguish. He had fought against it. Now he had surrendered, and this surrender had brought peace.

Nobel Prize-winner V.S. Naipaul first achieved critical acclaim with A House for Mr. Biswas, which appears at #72 on the Modern Library 100 and is on the (unranked) TIME 100. As you might imagine, the novel details the lifelong desire of Mohun Biswas, an Indian man born to expatriate parents in Trinidad, for a house of his own, as much for what it represents (independence, status, success, dignity, masculinity) as what it provides (privacy, stability, an escape from his insane in-laws). But Mr. Biswas is no up-from-nothing Horatio Alger hero – he’s petulant, immature, and incredibly self-centered to the point of all but ignoring his brilliant young son until the son’s academic efforts promise to shine respect upon his father.

Mr. Biswas is partly a comedy, with Naipaul mining some humor from small bits of dialogue and the minor calamities that befall the title character. Mr. Biswas goes to work for one of the smaller newspapers in Port of Spain, and receives some pointed and slightly obnoxious feedback from the paper’s harried editor:

‘”Considerably” is a big word meaning “very,” which is a pointless word any way. And look. “Several” has seven letters. “Many” has only four and oddly enough has exactly the same meaning.’

And Naipaul’s ear for dialogue down to the minutiae of conversation is very strong. But the core theme, that Mr. Biswas perseveres despite continued misfortunes, strikes me as less a celebration of human dignity than a mockery of how some people can’t get out of their own way – or perhaps that people can achieve their goals despite screwing up left and right for twenty or thirty years. Almost everything that goes wrong for Mr. Biswas is his own fault. He rushes to marry a girl of whom he knows nothing, then he keeps knocking her up despite the fact that they have no money and mooch off her extended (and crazy) family). He blows a month’s salary on a dollhouse for his daughter; he buys a house he can’t afford without even bothering to see it in the daylight; he’s rude to everyone, including his wife, and then acts surprised when he gets nastiness in return. By the end of the book, I was half-hoping he didn’t get the house after all, even though it was promised in the prologue that he did.

Naipaul receives tremendous praise for his prose, which is effusive and heavy on descriptive language, reminiscent of Dickens’ prose … but of course, Dickens wrote in serial form and was striving to fill pages and stretch stories out over more issues, making him the bane of English and American schoolchildren for over a century now. The book appeared on the TIME 100, compiled in 2005, but received a less-than-flattering review in the magazine in 1962 when Mr. Biswas was first published; the reviewer praised the colorful patois of the Indian expatriates in the novel and their melange of old and new customs, “but Naipaul’s House, though built of excellent exotic materials, sags badly; ‘economy, style, and a less elastic blueprint would have done wonders.” A verbose author can be a pleasure to read when the plot moves quickly or the novel is short, but neither was the case in Mr. Biswas, which runs 560 pages in the current paperback edition and lacks any major narrative thread to pull the reader to the finish.

Next up: Back to Wodehouse – sort of a Christmas tradition for me – with one of the few Jeeves novels I’ve never read, The Mating Season.