Early in the UK-based Indian writer Neel Mukherjee’s new novel, Ayush, an editor at a “self-styled literary imprint” in London, is exchanging emails with one of his authors, MN Opie, while working on the latter’s short story collection. Opie wonders if the common reader really cares about the order of the stories in the manuscript: “Can one leave the different strands that constitute a story or a novel seemingly unknit and hope – trust– readers to bring them together into meaning?” Ayush would rather the subtext was clearly spelt out. “Why not knit them for the reader?” He types, but then deletes the question.
The two questions are at the heart of Choice, which consists of three long, loosely linked tales, a book that Ayush might have pitched to his colleagues as “a novel-in-stories”. Ayush lives with his partner, Luke, an economist, and their two “white-ish” children in a lavish Victorian terrace on the perimeter of Dulwich and Herne Hill. Luke grew up in one of those loaded families with a trust fund and a villa in Gloucestershire; about Ayush, we’re only told he spent his early years in Kolkata (like Mukherjee), and that for his generation, the idea of gay parenting was “literally, unthinkable”. Now their kids go to a school in Brixton Hill and on weekends they go hiking with their dog, Spencer. Their daily schedules could have been grist for bourgeois bonhomie on TikTok, except that Ayush insists, and feels, that he is “at war with his own world”. He shows the children a documentary about pigs being slain in cages to wean them off meat. When Luke isn’t around, he installs cutoffs for the water supply to their three-storey house, with timers for all the lights. If that isn’t enough, he slices up his debit and credit cards and donates thousands of pounds stashed away for the children to organisations combating the climate crisis. Ayush isn’t the first fictional character to obsess about irreversible environmental damage; where Mukherjee succeeds is in rendering his agony, his insomnia, as absorbingly believable.
The other two stories in Choice were apparently written by Ayush’s authors, one way in which Mukherjee knits the different strands of this novel together for the reader. Emily is also grappling with insomnia. Late one night, her rideshare cab had been involved in a hit-and-run. She remembers the car hitting a boy and a dog somewhere around Cassland Road in east London, but a couple of days later, when she retraces the night’s route with a friend, she can’t find signs of any collision. The man driving the cab that night, Salim, turns out to be an undocumented Eritrean migrant, moonlighting for his brother, Karim, who needs to visit the hospital for dialysis twice a week. Emily spends nights at war with herself, ignoring her duties as a university professor, agonising about whether she should report the hit-and-run. Her increasing proximity to Salim has one foreseeable outcome: she starts writing a novel tracking his passage from Eritrea to England. But then she donates a kidney to Karim.
Why the radical empathy? Emily’s maternal grandparents, it turns out, once owned a tea estate in colonial India, and we witness her go back and forth with her mother on whether the empire might not have been all that bad: “We gave them the railways,” her mother says. Is the organ donation an attempt to exorcise the putative sins of her ancestors? Or did the crash catalyse an incipient, Rilkean desire to change her life? Mukherjee doesn’t provide any artless answers. At times, Emily’s predicament reminded me of the German writer Jenny Erpenbeck’s 2017 novel, Go, Went, Gone, which is also about an academic growing subtly attuned to the precarious lives around him.
Choice is undone by its third section – about an indigent family in a border hamlet in West Bengal, whose lives are transformed when a group of economists give them a cow as part of a social experiment. The story is set sometime in the past decade, but Mukherjee reproduces stereotypes of rural poverty – children filling up their bellies with starch water, and learning the alphabet by scrawling letters on the ground with a stick – dating back to colonial-era Bengal. Sabita and her two children are constantly fretting about making ends meet. They never seem to have any idle thoughts; even their laughter is a means to dispel “the cloud of anxiety that is the future”. Sabita keeps losing her temper – at her children, her neighbours, the cow. The kids, too, are no more than their timid, compliant selves. For the first time in the novel, nuance is eschewed for a preachy, threadbare morality. When read after the two stories set in London, Sabita’s saga of unmitigated woe leaves you with a distressing question. Does Mukherjee really think the poor, and those living in the global south, have no inner lives to speak of?
Choice by Neel Mukherjee is published by Atlantic (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
