The importance of V.S. Naipaul's stories

I don't mean to keep coming back to this theme, but I'm reading another "novel" from the 1970, In a Free State, by V.S. Naipaul (1971) and am beginning to think that there was either a moment in literary time - the 1970s - when writers decided that the traditional form of the novel was "dead" and that they had to try new forms and structures if the novel was to endure (it has) or publishers decided that anything goes might as well call everything a novel even if it's clearly a story collection, a memoir, an essay, whatever. Naipaul's In a Free State - which won the Booker Prize that year (would not have done so had it been called a story collection, I guarantee) comprises 5 pieces of varying lengths (a short narrative at beginning an end; two substantial stories; one, the title piece, long enough to be considered a short novel or "novella"). I've read the first three. If this were truly a novel there would be some overlap or connective tissue among these three - characters in common, plots touching one another, even the same setting (a form of the novel popular by the 1980s, e.g., Women of Brewster Place); in fact, the pieces, at least the first three, have in common an interest in the life and experiences of exiles and expats, particularly working class or underprivileged characters, outsiders and misfits struggling to find their way in a new, alien culture - in other words, they all read like examples of Naipaul's fiction. These are his themes, and he presents them in his style, So genre quibbling aside, the first 3 pieces are really good stories if you will: the first about a misfit aboard a trans-Mediterranean steamer who is harassed and isolated by his fellow-passengers, the 2nd about a cook/servant from Bombay who moves with his employer to DC and tries to make his way in a culture that seemst o him like another world, and the 3rd, the closest to Naipual's own experience, about a young man who leaves his Caribbean home for London where he hopes to reconcile with his younger brother, supposedly in London to study for advanced degrees. Each story involves struggle, failure, and loss; the 3rd is somewhat mysterious - there are references to the younger brother's killing a friend by "accidental" stabbing, and I can't quite figure out how this fits into the rest of the narrative: for a key plot point, VSN ignores any build-up or development. In any event, these stories, at least #2 (One Among the Many) and #3 (Tell Me Who to Kill) are literature on grand themes, collisions of cultures as seen through the evolving consciousness of an individual - despite all the game-playing and genre-bending of the 19780s these are stories that rise above their times, literature that matters.

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