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More reviews by Wayne E. Yang
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Sir Vidia's Shadow by Paul Theroux
PAUL THEROUX's SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW begins as novel. Abruptly in the second chapter, however, Theroux gives up the pretense and tells us that he is writing a memoir. "Wait, wait, wait," says Theroux. "You know I'm lying, don't you? This is not a novel, it is a memory." The book rings less true, strangely, once it veers from fiction to "fact."
The memory is of Theroux's relationship with Nobel Prize winner V.S. Naipaul, or "Vidia", a friendship that began in Uganda, when Theroux was still a young, unknown writer in his twenties and Naipaul a battle-tested writer in his mid-thirties. To Theroux, who had yet to produce a book, the attention and writing wisdom lavished on him by the often prickly Naipaul is a boon to his literary ambitions. Theroux's worship of Naipaul, in spite of the latter's conceit, is so complete that Theroux's friends in Uganda come to see it as "abandonment", a naked plot to become Naipaul's friend and "shadow." Even when the two authors later part, they continue to write each other letters, which Theroux says amounts "to a correspondence course in creative writing."
In the book, Theroux struggles constantly with the relationship, and is clearly preoccupied with what the friendship meant.
- "Friendship is plainer but deeper than love. A friend knows your faults and forgives them, but more than that, a friend is a witness. I needed Vidia as a friend, because he saw something in me I did not see. He said I was a writer."
- "Friendship arises less from an admiring love of strength than a sense of gentleness, a suspicious of weakness. It is compassionate intimacy, a powerful kindness, and a knowledge of imperfection."
- "Friends were the last people who should fail you and so were the last people to whom you should give another chance."
In a remark he recounts from his earlier history, Theroux says: "I would never write a book about Vidia. He is my friend. A book celebrates an ending, a finale. When the friend, or the friendship, is dead it needs a conclusion. It needs a death."
But of course Theroux does write a book, and the "finale" that inspires the book, if you will, is the end of Theroux's friendship with Naipaul, spurred largely by Naipaul's marriage to a new wife. "I was dazed, because I was liberated at last. I saw how the end of a friendship was the start of an understanding. He had made me his by choosing me; his rejection of me meant I was on my own, out of his shadow. He had freed, he had opened my eyes, he had given me a subject."
Theroux is the master of the pithy quote, the line that captures a character so well in a mannerism, a snippet of conversation or physical trait. He describes Naipaul's aversion to music: "It was not a pose. He really did hate music. He hated most sound, whether it was music or the human voice; he regarded all of it as noise."
Where this book loses power, however, is when Theroux rolls out laundry lists of Naipaul's faults, a sin of triteness I doubt Theroux would have committed if he had given himself distance and written SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW as a novel. Ironically, this book would have been more believable as fiction, if we could have been left guessing whether it was thinly-veiled biography. Instead, we are left wondering how much of the writing's acerbity is simply the product of a jilted friend.
"The truth is messy," Naipaul tells Theroux. "Writing must reflect that. Art must tell the truth. Every good book suggests that the writer, however painful to its subject, has arrived at some inward peace about it, some inner resolution, even of anger and despair, even though this peace and resolution is purely temporary." There are plenty of anecdotes in SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW to keep fans of Theroux and Naipaul entertained. Theroux, however, never seems to have come to peace with the end of the friendship. When he wrote this book, it seems he was still fettered by jealously.
Art requires truth; truth is messy. While it may be true that art is thus often messy, messiness is not necessarily art.
Wayne E. Yang
09/09/2002
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Wayne E. Yang is based in New York, where he lives with his wife and two children. His web site is www.wayneyang.com. |
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