Editor’s Note: Judy Bachrach writes for Vanity Fair, and is the creator of thecheckoutline.org, an online advice column for friends.

What? Is it me? Am I crazy or is everyone else? Two rave reviews in one newspaper (The New York Times) of a freshly released authorized biography about one Nobel Laureate novelist (V.S. Naipaul) who years ago wrote a very fine book (A Bend in the River). The male critics are dazzled. Thrilled. Naipaul so … forthcoming! The sex so … vivid! The details so … brutal!

The authorized biography is called The World Is What It Is. The first reviewer describes Naipaul, who was knighted by the Queen almost two decades ago, as “morally complicated,” which is the latest male euphemism for “total shit.”

The second mentions the novelist’s “tormented sexuality at the center of his creative efforts,” which is an interesting way of prostrating oneself before criminal behavior.

Now let’s review the details behind all that crap. In the 1970s, Naipaul met an Anglo-Argentine woman named Margaret Gooding, like him unhappily married. She left the husband of her three children very abruptly, only to turn into a bedroom punching bag.

Here’s how Naipaul describes the romance:

“I was very violent with her for two days with my hand; my hand began to hurt … She didn’t mind at all. She thought of it in terms of my passion for her. Her face was bad. She couldn’t appear in public. My hand was swollen. I was utterly helpless.”

But wait! There’s more! “I have enormous sympathy for people who do strange things out of passion,” Naipaul tells his biographer. And the reviewers just hum along to this song of himself. Oh, every once in a while one might mention the writer’s “bottomless narcissism,” but that, as it turns out, is just another guy word for sadism.

Now here’s a footnote. Years ago I met Margaret Gooding, when her liaison with the man she called “Vidia” was still ongoing in however erratic a fashion, and A Bend in the River had been published to huge acclaim. She was a thin, frail woman in an expensive wool dress, with a high unlined forehead and large puzzled eyes. She talked at length of her fears of abandonment. Naipaul came and went as he pleased, she told me; they fought and he vanished. Sometimes there was violence. Often, she mourned her decision – which she described as rash and hasty — to leave a husband who, whatever his faults, was a good provider and had once loved her very much.

"You know you could also leave Vidia," I suggested. "In fact you should – and quickly."

I was young. I couldn’t believe anyone in that day and age could be so afraid and submissive. Her passivity disturbed me. I knew nothing.

“Where would I go?” she asked. “Who would have me? I have left all the protection and safety I once knew.” 

I mention all this because in Sunday’s New York Times there was a similar story, only this one concerned Adriana Renteria, the onetime military wife of a man who had, among other things, choked and body-slammed her. To this day he hasn’t been prosecuted. In fact, despite her years of bruises and complaints to army higher-ups, her ex-husband was promoted to staff sergeant.

And after reading that story, I couldn’t help wondering – who is the biggest enabler? The military? Or the literary establishment?