Early on in Neel Mukherjee's new novel, Ayush, an editorial director at a London publishing house, sits in an acquisitions meeting and tells his colleagues about the book he is championing. He compares it to David Mitchell's debut "Ghostwritten" and masterpiece "Cloud Atlas," for in all three books, "discrete, disparate narratives come together cleverly to make a unified whole that we call a novel."
This turns out to be a moment of self-referential slyness as Mukherjee's "Choice" has a similar structure. It is composed of three sections, each loosely linked by tropes and themes, with characters' decisions that have crucial, and sometimes calamitous, repercussions.
In the first part, we follow Ayush as he gradually spirals out of control. In his job at Sennett and Brewer — commonly known as Sewer — he is plagued by the feeling he is the company's "diversity box, ticked." At home, he brings up young twins Masha and Sasha with his husband Luke, a level-headed economist who makes it clear he is the breadwinner and who routinely lectures Ayush about "efficiency and effectiveness and the superiority of market solutions."
Cracks deepen when Ayush acts behind Luke's back. To save energy, he hires a plumber to cut off their water. To save the environment, he transfers £200,000 from the children's education fund to climate change charities. And to wean the twins off meat, he dispenses with their usual bedtime story and shows them a video of pigs being slaughtered in an abattoir.
At odds with his husband and his "tribe," at war with the way of the world and in conflict with himself, Ayush heads out one night to drastically change his life.
Mukherjee's second section is a story by one of Ayush's authors, the reclusive M.N. Opie. Emily, a young academic, leaves a London dinner party and has an eventful taxi journey home. She gets to know the driver, Salim, an Eritrean refugee, and turns his desperate plight to her creative advantage. The book's final section, penned by Ayush's friend, swaps middle-class Londoners for a poor family in rural India. They receive a cow as a gift but, instead of improving their lives, it unleashes greater hardship.
At one point, Ayush scoffs at a certain type of book review — the language used and the "sentence-fetishizers'" propensity to nitpick. So, Ayushmay not approve of the following.
"Choice" can be read as a novel or as three stand-alone stories. The third part, though refreshingly different, proves the least involving. The first part, by far the strongest, is marred only by the scant insight it offers into publishing — an industry that, we are needlessly told, "hides behind the myth of the nobility and indispensability of literature to conduct what is ultimately business."
Otherwise, Mukherjee impresses. He captivates readers but also stimulates them by rigorously exploring race, agency, equality, the weight of our moral quandaries and the implications of our choices.
Malcolm Forbes, who has written for the Times Literary Supplement and the Wall Street Journal, lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Choice
By: Neel Mukherjee.
Publisher: Norton, 320 pages, $28.99.
