Years ago, working in a bookshop and reading reviews for the first time in my life, I learned of a new volume of non-fiction by V.S. Naipaul and decided that I would never read his books. I don’t remember why exactly, but he has been criticized over the years for his depiction of various peoples and his depiction of violence, which might have been highlighted in that review, and many other books and writers interested me more.

Lately, however, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we choose what to not read (when we deliberately choose, but also how our choices are shaped); suddenly, I was freshly curious about A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul, a book I’d once been so sure I would never read.

It’s nearly six hundred pages long, and my progress was helped by the fact that I wasn’t well and Mr. Biswas was a book within my reach. I read all by the last fifty pages while feeling poorly, and it seemed to heighten the main character’s sense of being pressed into a very narrow set of expectations and opportunities. Stuck in bed, I related even more keenly to Mohun’s sense of being stuck, restrained and constrained. Often I would close the book and push it away limply but, just a few moments later, resume. That sense of resignation mirroring some of the events in the story, too.

The book begins ten weeks before the death of Mr. Biswas, which we learn about in the prologue. Of course when this happens, one should adjust one’s anticipation and should attend to the details. But, I didn’t (which is typical, not a factor of feeling foggy-headed) so I didn’t notice the name of his wife, or the other details which could have acted like spoilers, and only halfway into the novel did I remember that he’d probably be dead at the end of it. (How do I miss these things? Partly because I’m intended to get swept away by the story.)

Meanwhile, he’d been a little boy with his first job (minding a neighbour’s young cow), then an older boy, a young man—and, so on: we follow Mohun Biswas through his whole life. And it’s not a very happy life either—not for him, not for anyone around him. And the talk of comedy on the book’s jacket? It’s that sort of dark and bleak humour where you simply cannot believe anything else could go wrong but, then, it does, so that it’s almost laughable, which isn’t quite the same as comic.

Which isn’t to say that his is a joyless story either. Or that there are no moments of beauty: there are many. Consider this incidental event, which begins by highlighting the importance of circumstance: when one bears a heavy load, every incremental movement is impacted.

“It was a Ford V-8 of the early nineteen-thirties, not inelegant, and it might have performed less erratically if it carried a lighter load. Under the weight of children and oranges it sank low on the rear springs, the bonnet was slightly uptilted, and for the steeper climbs the children had to get off. Often the car broke down and then the driver, who knew nothing about cars, asked the children to push. Like ants around a dead cockroach the children surrounded the car (the girls in their dark blue uniforms) and pushed and pulled. Sometimes they pushed for more than a mile. Sometimes they pushed the car to the top of a hill, jumped aside as it rolled down, heard it start, raced after it, as the driver urging them to hurry, sprang inside three at a time.”

The criticism, from scholars and critics, of Naipaul’s depiction of families like that of Mr. Biswas seems to revolve around the desperation and despair stoked by a life of poverty. Not only material poverty but emotional poverty. As a boy, he is famished for not only actual food but for affection and love, and this carries forward into adulthood.

It’s a mean existence, in every sense of that word, and provokes the age-old argument of whether it’s appropriate to allow characters who have experienced injustice to behave badly, whether that decision is exploitative or whether it affords them the equal capacity to make human choices. And Mr. Biswas does not often use good judgement in making decisions—whether because he is only a child (in the beginning) or because his deprivations have skewed his evaluations.

Born with six fingers, that sixth finger is eventually buried in the yard behind the Biswas house Mohun first inhabits as a child with his whole family; it’s the last time they all reside together, and events that transpire there will come to haunt every dwelling he inhabits.

The point is that Mohun isn’t like everyone else and, yet, he is almost unbearably ordinary. And whether his ideas change—about home and where/how we belong, to places and to one another—absorbs a few hundred pages.

“Never, as from the windows of that Buick, did North Trinidad look so beautiful. They noted, as though they had never seen it before from a bus, how the landscape changed, from marsh just outside Port of Spain, to straggling suburb, to hilly country, to country village, to country town, to rice fields and sugarcane fields, with the Northern Range always on their left. They drove along the smooth new American highway, were checked on entering and leaving the American army post by soldiers with helmets and rifles. Then they drove along a winding road overarched by cool trees to Arima, which welcomed careful drivers; and on to Valencia, where the road ran straight for miles, with untouched bush on either side.”

Consider how this expansive description of Trinidad only appears late in the novel. Early on, readers see the land as Mohun sees it, so there is no expanse, only the smallest of streams near the family home, each drop in the water appearing as a minor miracle. There are many characters important to the story, some belonging to different castes and some having come to Trinidad from different countries; these aspects of identity come parcelled with individuals and, only later, are understood to be part of historical events and patterns.

Naipaul patrols the narrative as vigilantly as these American soldiers: he observes, he authorizes readers’ access, he tends the boundary between civilized and wild spaces. This is his fourth novel, and it took three years to write. He apparently never revisited it after he finished its final proof in May of 1961. I’m glad that I didn’t know that it’s based on his own father’s life; at times I found myself wondering whether some of these characters were composites, because their experiences were often tense and sometimes tragic, and knowing that there were corollaries for each of them would have had me thinking more about biography than fiction. However, learning this in hindsight did leave me more curious about both the actual family’s experiences, and more curious about his process of writing fiction based on family history too. (His sense that writing it “destroyed memory” rather than preserved it, for instance. Wikipedia)

Ten years later, he would win the Booker for In a Free State, which the jury describes as five interconnected tales about “alienation, disruption and racial tension in a perilously unpredictable world”. All those qualities are also evident in the story of Mr. Biswas. He would go on to write even more non-fiction than fiction, about Asia and Africa as well as the Caribbean, about history and belief and literature, and various relationships between all those. Reading his bibliography, it really feels like a “body” of work.

In just this single novel, however, I see why some have levied accusations against Naipaul’s stories; violence, for instance, is a part of almost every relationship in this novel, and there is always at least one creature with power over one other creature, eventually wielded via backhand, palm, or fist. But where some have suggested that Naipaul condones this behaviour, I see it as represented but not excused. And I see the misery and the disadvantaged characters, but I don’t see that Naipaul claims that Mr Biswas represents all Trinidadian men or his family all Trinidadian families.

I want characters in my reading to be believable, to feel real, and Mr. Biswas does (in part, it seems, because he was real, once—his story being that of VSN’s father along with other family members). He makes some foolish choices, and sometimes he is thoughtless and sometimes he is cruel.

If you’re looking for a best friend, keep the applications coming. If you’re looking for a good story, Mr. Biswas has one to tell you. I wish I hadn’t made a snap judgement years ago, which kept me from reading it for myself all this time.