In a Free State
by V. S. Naipaul
Summary
This is a book of five parts that argue with each other rather than a novel in the ordinary sense. A prologue and epilogue drawn from a travel journal frame three pieces of fiction, and the connection between them is a question rather than a plot: what happens to a person who has been detached from the place that made them.
In the first, an Indian servant is brought to Washington by his employer and slowly discovers that freedom in America means being alone in it. In the second, a Caribbean man in London narrates, from a place the reader gradually identifies as a mental hospital, the destruction of his brother and himself. The long title piece follows two white expatriates, Bobby and Linda, driving across an unnamed African country in the days after a coup, bickering about nothing while the country outside the car becomes lethal.
Naipaul is a formidable and thoroughly unkind writer. Nobody in this book is spared and the reader is offered no one to side with, which is either the honesty of it or the coldness, depending on your tolerance.
It is short and the drive in the title story is close to unbearable in its tension. Expect no comfort and considerable skill. Naipaul's politics and personal conduct are both genuinely objectionable, and readers who would rather not are entitled to say so.
The pieces can be read separately over several evenings, which suits the form. Start with the title novella if you only want one, since it is the strongest and stands alone completely.
Historical Context & Significance
In a Free State won the Booker Prize in 1971, and the judges argued about whether it was eligible at all. The judges argued at length over whether a framing narrative wrapped around three separate stories constituted a novel.
They gave it the prize anyway, and the question has recurred at intervals ever since, most notably when Thomas Keneally won with a work of documentary reconstruction in 1982.
V.S. Naipaul was Trinidadian born and had been publishing for fifteen years. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. His reputation is now inseparable from his conduct and his opinions, both extensively documented by his own authorised biographer, and the arguments about how to read a writer of that stature and that behaviour have not settled.