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Bleak and dispiriting.

In the final chapter Naipaul concludes that "Independence has worked for ...people more or less at the top" but that by 1990 "the freedom [independence] brought has worked its way down. People everywhere have ideas now of who they are and what they owe themselves."

That's a telling phrase: "what they owe themselves". Few of the men portrayed here seem able to spare much energy for those around them, even their own families. Most of the men (and in Naipaul's book we hear almost exclusively from men) seem utterly self-absorbed--locked in mental prisons of disappointment, bitterness, ideology, and tribal/caste/class resentments. They seem terribly petty, these men, unable to escape a sort of pervasive inwardness, some convinced of their own rightness, others simply caught in a thought pattern too long held.

But Naipaul says it could not be otherwise: "The liberation of spirit that has come to India could not come as release only. In India, with its layer below layer of distress and cruelty, it had to come as disturbance. It had to come as rage and revolt. India was now a country of a million little mutinies."

If true 'liberation of spirit' requires some ability to transcend the self, then liberation is hard to find in this book. I can only hope that things have gotten better in the 25 years since this book was written.

Yet, despite the bleakness, V.S. Naipaul's great gift is that he can stand back and let those he interviews speak for themselves. He also has an artist's eye for tiny details of dress, surroundings, speech patterns. In the end the reader emerges with a vivid sense of having been there too.