The life of the greatest prose writer in the English language of the last 60 years has ended at the age of 85, though many of us were reluctant to celebrate VS Naipaul in such terms when he was alive and we may stop short at acknowledging his full significance when we mourn him. Some of us may not mourn him at all: a fate generally reserved for dictators.

The reasons for turning away from Naipaul the writer are related to how his writing expressed his humanity – or lack of it. Naipaul’s discomfiting assertions – about Islam, about women, about countries less fortunate than the one he lived and died in (especially the Trinidad of his birth, Africa, and to some extent, India) – are often unjustified, unpleasant and untrue, though he insisted that, despite their unpleasantness, they possessed the unflinching quality of truth.

I think this part of Naipaul’s contribution was overplayed, both by those who couldn’t abide him and by himself. His achievement has to be the writing itself: time will tell us if this true. Certainly, it won’t be possible to keep alive the idea of his gift for very long if he was just an agglomeration of blind spots and hostile prejudices. This is the paradox of literature, whose value lies in itself and not in the writer’s “views” (as WH Auden pointed out in his elegy to WB Yeats): none of Naipaul’s regrettable opinions will make the writing disappear, if it indeed possesses originality.

Naipaul’s writerly achievements have taken a backseat for reasons I’ve mentioned; but there’s another reason, which is so obvious that we aren’t conscious of it. Naipaul was not white. This means we must primarily view him as a representer – or misrepresenter – of the culture he came from, rather than as one who’s renewing language and radically rethinking the form he uses. After all, how can you renew something – in this case, the English language and the novel as a genre – which you don’t have cultural ownership of (the novel is seen to be a Western invention “adapted” to other milieus)? At most, you could admit Naipaul wrote impressively (the implication being that he wrote English unusually well for a non-white person). That his impact as a formal innovator was greater and more crucial than almost any of his contemporaries’ is something we’re just beginning to understand, because none of us as yet have the critical language with which to think of a brown man in that way; especially a grandson of an indentured labourer.

Despite Naipaul’s vision darkening with the political turmoil of 1970s Africa, I don’t think his deep and defining love of life ever vanished

If we were to look at two books that exemplify Naipaul’s achievement, they would be A House for Mr Biswas (1961) and The Enigma of Arrival (1987). Neither novel received any awards. Despite its occasionally difficult subject - the transformations and travails of Mr Biswas, a man of little means who was based on Naipaul’s father, and who marries into a powerful but crass Trinidadian family - Biswas expresses Naipaul’s astonishing capacity for joy. This joy, this buoyancy and love, animated his early works. It can be seen in the opening sentence of his first piece of writing, the stories in Miguel Street: “Every morning when he got up Hat would sit on the banister of his back verandah and shout across, ‘What happening there, Bogart?’” Immediately, we’re taken out of the sense of interiority we associate with the psychological novel. Naipaul was beholden to cinema, and his attention to the visual is evident in Biswas too, which contains an unusually compelling immediacy that is almost unthinkable for a novel of over 500 pages. Given its size, we think of Biswas as a proto-Victorian novel, but it isn’t one: its preoccupations are the moment-to-moment transformations of Biswas’s world, and his proneness to daydreaming. As a commentator, Naipaul excoriated, and was haunted by, the “half-made” (his assessment of West Indian society); as a novelist, the half-made – a sign being painted in Trinidad; a ruined cottage in Wiltshire – excited him deeply.

Despite Naipaul’s vision darkening with the political turmoil of 1970s Africa, I don’t think his deep and defining love of life ever vanished. In fact, I see the despair – the madness, almost – of some of the less tenable pronouncements to not be just a denial of love, but inextricable from it. This love lights up The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul’s novel set in rural Wiltshire (where he himself lived), but it is also a work of revelatory self-reflexivity. Few writers have dwelt on the strange contingency that writing entails with as much as richness as Naipaul did – first in the short Finding the Centre, then most powerfully in this book. The Enigma of Arrival is, besides being a novel, an essay enquiring into writing and living, and into what comprises the line that ostensibly divides the two.

By 1987, that dividing line was wavering for Naipaul, and proving increasingly irrelevant and cumbersome. And so he departed the realist novel for what was at first mistaken by some for a proto-memoir. The Enigma of Arrival appeared at an odd and, for it, isolating time, when postcolonial studies and the epic Indian novel in English were in full swing, and some years before WG Sebald’s formally hybrid works, dealing with similar questions (but in his case legitimately so, since he was European), made their appearance. It’s clear now, though, that many younger writers then, who were bored of realism and magic realism, and categories such as “autobiography” and “fiction” – I’m thinking of myself, certainly, but also of Deborah Levy, Teju Cole, Caryl Phillips, and Karl Ove Knausgaard, among others – had silently registered the impact of this anomalous book.

Though many of us disagree fundamentally with his views, we are beholden to what Naipaul has given us: not as members of a particular ethnicity, group, or gender, but as people, whose experience of the world flows into the experience of writing.