Nicholas Laughlin's blog etc.

The essays in Literary Occasions show that Naipaul has spent 50 years questioning his vocation. Why did he stick with it? What is he doing with it? On the face of it, the answer is simple. Naipaul became a writer because his father, Seepersad Naipaul, was also a writer. Yet each time Naipaul approaches the relation between his father's writing and his own, he keeps producing a new piece of information that makes one doubt the simple cause and effect.

-- From Nicholas Blincoe's review of Literary Occasions, published last Sunday in the Telegraph.