I agree! Theroux and Naipaul have an undercurrent of nastiness in their writing. E.g. the # of times Theroux describes someone's shirt as dirty in The Happy Isles of Oceania. Doesn't he realize that the people he's talking about live in huts and don't have money? I like reading them both, but won't like to meet them while traveling. Seems like they would be judging me constantly.

It's said Dickens based the character "Harold Skimpole" in Bleak House on his friend Leigh Hunt. It must have hurt. Skimpole is naieve, feckless, uncaring of others, sponges money endlessly from everyone and anyone. I wonder how they patched that one up afterward. (Hunt was not Skimpole: Dickens took his ideas and magnified them into the character but it can't have felt good)

Non-sequitur for this thread, but I can’t reply to old posts on HN and I don’t see any DM functionality.

I saw your post on an affirmative action thread about class vs race on an economist article from a few months ago, and I was wondering how your son’s college applications ended up going.

Fun Fact - Naipaul and Theroux were great friends, in fact Theroux credits Naipaul for encouraging him to become a writer. But when Theroux criticized Naipaul's writing they fell apart and there was a long lasting feud between them.