Books: Notes from the Fourth World

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Notes from the Fourth World A BEND IN THE RIVER by V.S. Naipaul; Knopf; 288 pages; $8.95

"The tall lilac-coloured flower had appeared only a few years before, and in the local language there was no word for it. The people still called it 'the new thing' or 'the new thing in the river,' and to them it was another enemy. Its rubbery vines and leaves formed thick tangles of vegetation that adhered to the river banks and clogged up waterways. It grew fast, faster than men could destroy it with the tools they had. The channels to the villages had to be constantly cleared. Night and day the water hyacinth floated up from the south, seeding itself as it travelled."

V.S. Naipaul is not the sort of writer who needs a metaphor to improve the clarity of his art. Yet this passage from his new novel, A Bend in the River, colors a simple botanical fact with the suggestion of a broader truth. Alex Haley notwithstanding, uprootedness remains the predominant theme of the times. The good modern novelists know this, and Naipaul is one of the best. He is also one of the most exotically unrooted, an Indian, born on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, who has spent most of his life in England. Like his friend Paul Theroux (The Great Railway Bazaar), Naipaul can haunt the dusty corners of the world for months on end. His nonfiction reports are Baedekers of forgotten history and cultural schizophrenia. Former colonies in the West Indies and Africa, for example, may denounce the ways of their previous masters, but they are fatefully wedded to them. It is a condition frequently encountered in Naipaul's work. He once wrote about asking for the local guava jelly in one of Trinidad's intellectual clubs, only to be told that they only had English greengage jam.

In his new novel, the elite of an African river town gather daily at Bigburgers. The Dr. Livingstones of market research have left no port uncalled. "They don't just send you the sauce, you know, Salim. They send you the whole shop," boasts the franchisee.

To Salim, a coastal African descended from fastidious Indian immigrants, Bigburgers resemble "smooth white lips of bread over mangled black tongues of meat." Salim is the novel's narrator who, like the self-seeding hyacinth, drifts through the swirls of political and social change. The result is a sensitive fictional character with the detachment of an anthropologist.

Although the river, the town and the nation of the book are not named, a compact and teeming world is irresistibly realized. There are those special breeds of Levantines and Greeks who stick it out on the ragged edges of free enterprise; the inevitable scholars, priests and primitive-art collectors; old servants who have made parasitism an honorable profession; and promising young men who will go directly from dugout to jet. The economy of the town remains fairly simple. Villagers from the bush sell smoked monkey meat to steamer passengers. The money is used to buy pots, cloth and razor blades from the shops in town. The shopowners can then eat Bigburgers.