V.S. Naipaul and autofiction

V.S. Naipaul's 1988 "novel," The Enigma of Arrival, is a precursor to what today we call "autofiction," that is, a first-person narrative that adheres or appears to adhere as closely as possible to the facts of the author's life - a work that straddles the border of fiction and memoir and draws from the advantages of both modes. VSN wasn't the first - clearly, Proust laid the groundwork for this type of fiction - though close first-person narration wasn't identified as a mode unto itself until recently - with Knausgaard and Ferrante being two of the most successful contemporary practitioners. Of course all novelst draw on their life experience to some degree - that's inevitable; what other material does a writer have to work w/: experience, imagination, learning, and feelings, pretty much that's it. VSN's Enigma differs slightly from his next-gen successors in that he already had a well-known and publicized life as a writer at the time of its composition. That is, few, especially in the English-language world, knew much about Knausgaard or Ferrante until reading their novels; we didn't read them to be filled in about an author whom we already "knew." In VSN's case, part of what draws us along is our knowledge about and interest in his career (maybe that's especially true as we read this work after his death). The narrative tells of a writer in all known respects exactly like VSN (with a peculiar reticence about discussing any aspect of his emotional or sexual life): young man from Trinidad, scholarship student to Oxford, struggling writers, successful writer, seeking retreat in the countryside to work on a challenging novel. The 2nd section in particular - The Journey - tells in what feels autobiographical about his first travel abroad from Trinidad to his arrival and early life in England (Oxford, London). Would we be as interested if there were no connection between narrator and author, if somehow we could imagine this being written by, say, a 30-year-old American writer? Obviously in writing a novel as opposed to a writer's memoir (see for comparison Roth's The Facts of Updike's Self-consciousness), VSN has more freedom to create, elude, or elide as much as he wishes, but I still have to wonder why he didn't lay it all on the table and identify this work as his attempt to tell the story of not just a writer's life but of his own.