The significance of Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival

V.S. Naipaul concludes his 1987 novel, The Enigma of Arrival, with a short section that makes no claim to being anything but a personal essay in which he recounts the unexpected death of his younger sister, his journey to his homeland, Trinidad, to witness the traditional Hindi cremation service, and his reflection on how he began to write the novel - the autofiction we would call it today - that we have just finished reading. He describes his several failed attempts to begin writing his impressions and memories of his 10 years in a cottage (later a house he purchases) in Wiltshire, a retreat from the pressures of the literary scene in London. Only the death of his sister and the Hindi ideas about reincarnation provide him with the genesis of an idea and enable him to embark on this interior journey. In essence, his novel illustrates and illuminates an idea he expressed near the beginning, in reflecting on the famous de Chirico painting of the title; VSN thought about a man who arrives in a strange, foreign port, wanders around the city, loses his way at times, eventually returns to the port only to see that the ship that brought him to shore has departed: What he had thought of as an adventure or excursion - a "vacation" from his life or a version of the pastoral - was in fact his whole life. He has led his life and finds himself at the end of the journey. So it is, or was, with VSN's retreat to Wiltshire - not an escape or break from life, but his life itself. And in the process, his life intersects w/ that of many others - his "landlord" (a distant, silent, Godlike figure) and the various employees of the estate and other inhabitants on what were once the manor grounds. Each has his or her life story - some of which he recounts for us - and they become over the course of time more rounded, more real - not as characters in a novel but as people living ordinary lives in conjunction w/ one another. VSN's condescension toward his neighbors, so evident and troubling at first, diminishes over the course of the novel; he will never be a warm and comforting presence, but he does come to understand that his idea of a successful life might have no meaning or significance for his neighbors; they seem unaware of his literary status - whereas he, at least at first, is highly judgmental of most of his neighbors and of his friends and acquaintances from London: his refusal to write back to Angela, his indifference toward the overtures of friendship from his landlord, his casual dismissal of the death of his literary friend Alan: VSN seems, at least at first, to believe that his is better than others because he has stayed true to his vision and has overcome so many obstacles on route to his success. But at the end we sense that his vision has broadened, that he has "led his life" without realizing it (like the man in that James story, waiting for something great to happen to him and it never does) - yet we also wonder: Was his actual life different in any significant ways from the life of his narrator? Why is he  seemingly alone throughout his time in Wiltshire? Did he ever know love, or even companionship? This is a powerful novel, but dreadfully sad at its heart.