Absolute poverty and literary grievances, Indian hamlets and London dinner parties: the totemic and the trivial collide in Neel Mukherjee’s fourth full-length novel. Choice is cleaved into three subtly connected stories of about a hundred pages that each ask “big questions about individual choices and agency”. There is a logic and discipline to each tale, plus a splash of postmodern playfulness.
The first story, within which hints of the other two are quietly nested, is about Ayush, a
“consumed, jittery, unsettled” London publisher. Crippled by OCD, climate anxiety and parenthood, he retaliates by being challenging. He terrifies his children into vegetarianism by showing them a video of pigs being slaughtered. He attacks the “cultural narcissism” of “white women”, presumably the primary readers of his books. He fumes at the tired, lazy platitudes that pass for book reviews in the newspapers. In his most satisfying act of rebellion, he installs a cut-off on the shower and timers on the lights without telling his husband, an economist. “You’ll of course recommend leaving it to the market” to sort out global warming, Ayush snarls. “Well, we’re waiting.”
His antics are amusing enough, and no doubt for their author a cathartic broadside against the
literary scene that typecast him for his Booker-nominated Indian family saga The Lives of Others
ten years ago. Yet it is all rather insular, until Ayush receives a manuscript submission containing the story of a young academic involved in a car accident and, later on, hears about an economic experiment where westerners gave cows to randomly selected women in India to “improve their lot”.
The second part ups the pace. Heading home from a drunken evening, Emily, the academic, is concussed as her driver rams into a boy and his dog, then keeps on driving. Two days later the driver shows up at her house. “What haltingly emerged”, as the driver tells her his past, is “soiled and spirit-lowering”: forced conscription in Eritrea, slavery, homelessness in Italy, then his precarious London existence caring for an ill brother. We enter “the infernal motor” of Emily’s bruised mind as, gradually, the simple calculation of reporting him to the police becomes more fraught. The dilemma is more desperate than Ayush’s, the moral heft greater.
The third story is the sharp end. A family in the roadless village of Nonapani is given a cow without any say in the matter, which brings confusion, complication, then catastrophe. “If they had really wanted to help, could they not have given her some money?” the mother says to herself with a sigh as she fails to shape the cow’s dung into fuel cakes. The contrast with Ayush’s rarefied struggle is cosmic. This is fiction as a way to step outside oneself, a destroyer of certainty.
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Mukherjee writes with flair. He describes “dust-moted shafts” of light slicing through a dinosaur skeleton, feasting mosquitoes in the monsoon season and daffodils with their “kitschy heads”. He excels at imagining the inner lives of animals. Gauri the cow is perplexed that she “has never seen these humans lick each other; such an odd omission from life”; Spencer the dog is “a biscuit-gold creature, darting, leaping”, for whom the world “is a whole map of smells”.
The nitpicking critic of Ayush’s nightmares might say there is a tendency to over-explain or even review-proof the book; an attempt to have it both ways. On reading what turns out to be the second part of the novel, Ayush marvels that “entirely unwritten in the story was its chief meaning: how no escape was offered by making what one thought was the correct moral choice”. (Fine, but now it is very much written.)
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In Ayush’s protestations and Emily’s agonised inaction, one can detect the author’s slightly apologetic defence of the right to have his characters pontificate at length. This can be interesting — mentions of Hamlet and JM Coetzee’s discursive, philosophical fiction signal the type of work he admires — as long as those ideas are engaging enough. Good, then, that he aims high, with pleasurable expositions on the way privilege enables life to flow in “predictably comfortable runnels”.
Choice is uneven. At the level of prose it shines. It is always stimulating but only belatedly pleasurable. You finish the final story dazzled by Mukherjee’s ambition and gusto. Then you remember the smug throat-clearing that preceded it, and the gleam fades.
Choice by Neel Mukherjee (Atlantic, 320pp; £18.99). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
