A Turn in the South.

• Author: Rothchild, John

A Turn in the South.

This is a curious book altogether. It lacks the coherence of Naipaul's earlier nonfiction and is more ramble than essay, full of chance encounters and long, breezy interviews with catfish farmers, waitresses, motel clerks, writers, and especially preachers, for whom Naipaul has always had a nose. It's charming to follow this Indian raised in Trinidad, who looks from his jacket photograph like an aged Seminole or Creek, as he checks in and out of rural motels in Mississippi and Alabama, discovers rednecks for the first time and tries to imagine that he's back on the Ganges: "In a pond beside the road on the way to Fort Oglethorpe [Georgia], cattle stood in muddy water up to their bellies--one might have been in India."

But this is not an idle ramble. It's soon apparent that Naipaul is taking a position, although whether this came to him beforehand or during the journey is unclear. What he argues, essentially, is that the New South (the fast-growing cities, the research centers, the prosperous university towns) is alienating and somehow evil, while the Old South, the poor and rural South, offers faith, community, and significance. This is fascinating to those of us who are more likely to associate the indecency of racism with the Old South and moral regeneration with the New.

His decision to condemn the contemporary and to revel in the bygone causes Naipaul to be curiously selective in his treatment of the race problem. He levels his outrage against Atlanta, the capital of the New South and a place where blacks are believed to have gotten ahead. His point about Atlanta is that blacks may have gained political power but not economic power, and that the one without the other is worse than no power at all: "Perhaps the very dignity that the politics of the city offered a black man made him more aware of the great encircling wealth and true power of white Atlanta. So that the politics of Atlanta might have seemed like a game, a drawing off of rage from black people."

As right as Naipaul may be about Atlanta, his conclusion that the city's racial progress is worse than nothing has another unstated purpose. It enables him to glorify parts of the Old South, where blacks are even less likely to move ahead. Once he's left Atlanta and headed for Charleston, Naipaul drops his cudgel and allows himself to be romanced by the "order and faith, music and melancholy" of the remnants of plantation culture. From blacks and whites alike, we...