And how close have we come, in real life, to the society of vapid consumers, idle pleasure-seekers, inner-space trippers and programmed conformists that it presents?... And at the same time we want to be those anguished others, because we believe, with John, that life has meaning beyond the play of the senses, and that immediate gratification will never be enough.

There is only one kind of narrative fiction that Naipual understands to be properly modern; a sort of late Victorian, realist, slightly constipated fiction with a thoroughly old-fashioned narrative, an economic use of words, plenty of natural description (countryside, gardens, townscapes) and so on. The nonsense of post-Joyce, post-Svevo, post-Musil narriative, the 'literature of exhaustion' once celebrated by John Barth, can and should be flushed down the latrine. ; - Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Where Does He Come From?", in The London Review of Books, Nov.