In another sense, the novel tells the story of "half a life" in terms of quality rather than quantity (length of life). Willie leads only half a fully-developed human life in the book because of his frustration, for sexual as well as other reasons, and lack of purpose. As Willie comes to realize, the reader comes to realize the rather empty character of Willie's life.

Perhaps another sense in which the novel tells the story of "half a life" is that the author does not tell us Willie's full story. We learn about his frustrated ambitions, his family, his travels, and something of his sexuality. The book seems to suggest that there is more to the character, both within him and without him, than the author tells us.

A final sense in which the book tells of "half a life" lies in its autobiographical character. The book seems to be based in part on Naipaul's own life. But it does so by taking details from an actual lived life and scrambling them up and changing them through imagination, just in the way that Willie in the novel uses movie plots to create his volume of short stories. For example in the book Willie is born in India, goes to college in England as a scholarship student, and then lives in Mozambique. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, went to England as a scholarship student, and has written much about India.

All these possible meanings to the term "half a life" focus on Willie's lack of self-knowledge and his difficulty in attaining it. Willie seems the constant outsider. He is never comfortable with himself of where he is. He has no real plan or purpose for himself. In the book, he learns that he is a writer of promise and produces a good first volume of short stories. But he doesn't follow-up and leads a drifting life in Mozambique for 18 years. Equally important, Willie is sexually frustrated and, as he stresses, sexually ignorant. Willie's sexual frustration has its beginning in the India of his boyhood and in the unhappy relationship between his parents. It continues through his college years in London where he has sexual relationships with his friends' girlfriends and with prostitutes. And in Mozambique he continues his relationships with young African prostitutes and with the wives of acquaintances.

The story is for the most part astringently told. The book is in three large sections which describe Willie's life in India, his life as a student in London, and his years in Mozambique. I was greatly drawn into the first two parts of the book, particularly the middle section describing Willie's student days in London. The third lengthy section describing Willie's life in Mozambique in the final years of colonial rule falls off, alas, markedly.

This is a very tough-minded book about its protagonist's inability to come to terms with himself, to find a goal in life he can pursue and a full human sexual relationship. It suggests the many ways in which people are limited, through their own choices or through their circumstances, to living "half a life".

After the first 30 pages or so, which reminded me of Narayan's The Guide, I was next reminded of Naipaul's own A House for Mr. Biswas. There's a father-son element in these pages which is easy to relate to Naipaul's 2000 collection of letters between himself and his own father.

Perhaps the meanings that one senses early in the book are pretty much the ones that one ends with.

The book's not much of an advertisement for humanism. I imagine that Malcolm Muggeridge would have approved of this book for that reason as well as because its prose is so good. When I had finished Half a Life, I found myself thinking it should be compared to another book whose narrative ends in a remote, exotic, and, to the author, unappealing locale -- namely, Evelyn Waugh's famous novel, A Handful of Dust.

Naipaul convinces us that Willie Chandran, the protagonist/narrator, has had various sexual experiences, including, in his late thirties or at around forty, ones that give him more physical satisfaction than he had experienced before - - but that they are recognized as a dead end, so that even while Willie is preoccupied with them (his life has become idle), he tells us that a "half-feeling of the inanity of my life grew within me, and with it there came the beginning of respect for the religious outlawing of sexual extremes." That isn't something 99 out of a hundred modern novelists would tell you, and most of them wouldn't tell you that, I suppose, because they aren't smart enough and honest enough to do so. It doesn't seem that Naipaul falls for the line that, in a world ultimately meaningless, the best chance many of us have for an interesting life is a sexually varied one.

Willie can write, earlier, that he thought "how terrible it would have been if, as could so easily have happened, I had died without knowing this depth of satisfaction, this other person that I had just discovered within myself. It was worth any price, any consequence." That is something that, I believe, many modern writers believe or want to believe, but Naipaul doesn't leave it at that.

Still half a Naipaul is better than most authors in their entirety. His simple language and syntax, almost Hemingwayesque in its declaration but vastly more elegant, makes this a deceptively easy read, but beware. There are layers of meaning throughout in his subtle characterizations and descriptions of place and customs; Naipaul's cooly ironic style sometimes keeps them hidden. The irony is thick enough to be cut with a blade.

The title certainly refers to the main character, Willie Chadran, who feels, by age forty-one, that his best years are behind him, never to be recovered, and that he has wasted his life in desultory pursuits of sex and literary fame. But he is not the only character not living life to its fullest. Others fritter theirs away chasing material possessions and political power and social mobility. An air of doom pervades the novel generally, a sense of impending chaos, an end to life as these characters know it, and by the time the book ends there are indeed signs of destruction, departure, and change. All these folks can do is run away from the ephemera of their own artificial lives, their illusions.

Not great Naipaul but compelling throughout and probably better than anything else around at the moment.