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.