by V. S. Naipaul.

Knopf. 189 pages. $24.95.

BY SAM COALE
Special to the Journal

You can always sense if not describe great writing. It seems effortless, without strain, clear, and authoritative. V.S. Naipaul has always written this way, paring down his sentences, stripping them to declarative narrative in a kind of hard-edged, luminous purity. I’ll read anything he writes.

His new book wrestles with the interplay between writers and their cultures. Thus Anthony Powell in Britain, however dull as a writer, loves to display his “social knowledge,” a limitation in “over-written-about societies.” Flaubert gets carried away with his stultifying, operatic-gothic love of orientalist detail in Salammbo. Classical writers like Caesar and Cicero often avoid gory details as if trying to “hide from reality.” And growing up on St. Lucia, Derek Wolcott, whose 25 Poems in 1949 launched a brilliant career, found himself “rescued by the American universities,” even though initially his “talent had been all but strangled by his colonial setting.”

Naipaul is also searching yet again for his own roots as a world-famous writer. Born on Trinidad and confined to its small Indian community, he recognized early its lack of culture, its “spiritual emptiness,” its colonial history of sugar plantations and the lash, one of many “small places with simple economies [that] bred small people with simple destinies.” If the landscape of your childhood forms you as a writer, how do you deal with its total lack of interest?

Naipaul defines writing as a “vision, a way of seeing and feeling,” and in these perceptive and forthright, if often waspish, essays, he tries to define his as well. He admires his father’s short stories, however “tricked up” and confined to the old rituals of claustrophobic and romanticized “local Indian life.” He admires the “magical, unexpected detail” in all writing and expertly describes at his grandmother’s house the mattress-maker who has no sense of culture and exists to fill his function. Or the tale of a cure made from tortoise urine and baked earthworms. The spare, luminous detail for him is where true art lies.

There’s much more, including Gandhi’s mismatched, fragmented sense of self and vision or the details from Nirad Chaudhuri’s The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951). And always Naipaul explores the ever-changing, ongoing dynamic between a writer and his past, his milieu, his imaginative vision. It’s always in transition, never static, constantly shifting.

At one point he describes the perspective of his first book: “It was a ‘flat’ view of the street . . . I went right up close to it . . . shutting out what lay outside. I knew even then that there were other ways of looking. . . . ” That meticulous closeness survives and charges his art, but there’s no flatness here at all. A WRITER’S PEOPLE: Ways of Looking and Feeling: An Essay in Five Parts,

samcoale@cox.net