Miguel Street

The Street and Its Characters

Miguel Street is a short street in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and for the boy who narrates all seventeen of these stories, it is the whole world. The boy does not have a name. He watches. He listens. He remembers the men of the street with an attention that is both loving and clear-eyed, in the way that children observe adults before they have learned to look away from inconvenient truths.

The men of Miguel Street are memorable in the way that minor figures in a Dickens novel are memorable — each defined by an obsession or a pretension or a strategy for survival that has hardened into personality. Hat is the street’s natural leader, cheerful and practical and fond of rum. B. Wordsworth is the poet who has been writing a single great poem for twenty years, one line per month, and who teaches the boy to look at the world as a poet looks at it, which means with patience and without attachment to outcome. Morgan is the pyrotechnist whose fireworks displays are magnificent disasters. Man-man is the street’s prophet, who one day arranges to have himself crucified and then, when the stones actually begin to fly, starts screaming for everyone to stop.

The women of the street are differently constrained. Laura has eight children by eight fathers and survives by a cheerfulness so complete it reads as its own kind of courage. The prostitutes on the street’s edges manage their lives with a pragmatism the men cannot match. The narrator’s mother appears throughout — sharp, protective, capable of a humor as dry as the Trinidad heat. The street is predominantly male in its attention, and Naipaul is honest about this, but the women he does draw are not merely ornamental.

Comedy and Colonialism

The comedy in Miguel Street is inseparable from the colonial condition, though Naipaul is too good a writer to make the connection explicit. The men of the street are performing versions of respectable manhood — the poet, the engineer, the fighter, the entrepreneur — that have been handed to them by a society that has simultaneously made those roles largely unavailable. Bogart, who disappears periodically and returns with glamorous stories, is doing what the street does collectively: constructing a self that the circumstances do not support, and sustaining it through collective willingness to pretend.

The narrator’s growing awareness that he will leave — that the scholarship to England is his escape from all of this — is handled with extraordinary delicacy. He does not romanticize the street, but he does not reduce it to a lesson about colonial failure either. The people of Miguel Street are not victims of colonialism in any simple sense; they are people who have made a life under conditions they did not choose, and the comedy of their extravagant self-inventions is a form of dignity. When the narrator finally leaves, the book’s last line is among the saddest and most honest in Caribbean literature: he looks back once and then does not look back again.

The gender politics are, as the cons note, of their time. The treatment of the women in the men’s lives reflects the street’s own values more than the narrator’s critique of them, and readers who come to Naipaul from contemporary Caribbean fiction will notice the gap. But the comedy — which is real comedy, not ironic distancing — makes Miguel Street more generous than most of Naipaul’s later work, and the affection with which the street is rendered is not available elsewhere in his catalogue.

Reading Naipaul From the Beginning

Miguel Street was written first — Naipaul wrote it in London in 1955 — but published third, after The Mystic Masseur (1957) and The Suffrage of Elvira (1958). His publishers felt it was too slight to launch a career. They were wrong about its quality, though not entirely wrong about its relationship to the major work: A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) is the novel that established Naipaul as a major writer, and Miguel Street is best read as the place where the characters and the world of that novel were first sketched, in miniature and with a lightness that the longer novel would not attempt.

Miguel Street won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1961, a prize designed to give young British Commonwealth writers money to travel and a reason to be noticed. Naipaul used the money to return to Trinidad, from which he had come on exactly the kind of scholarship his narrator receives at the end of the book. The Nobel Prize came in 2001, four decades later, and the committee cited the “unsentimental perception” in his work — a quality that Miguel Street has in abundance while retaining a warmth that some of his later work sacrifices.

For readers new to Naipaul, the order that makes most sense is Miguel Street first, then A House for Mr. Biswas, then In a Free State (1971) for the transition to the colder, more difficult later work. A Bend in the River (1979) is the culmination of that later mode and should be approached after the earlier books have established what was lost as well as gained.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — Naipaul’s warmest and most accessible book, and the one that makes clearest why the people and the place he left behind continued to generate his best work for the rest of his career.