Poor Sasha, Poor Masha

Promoting​ literary fiction can seem like a mug’s game at the best of times, with all those writers perpetually at the peak of their powers, but there’s a special reason for the whistling-in-the-dark tone of the cover copy for Neel Mukherjee’s fourth novel, Choice – ‘breathtaking and devastating’ it says, as a placeholder, on the proof, though the finished version settles on ‘a masterful inquiry into how we should live our lives, and how we should tell them’. The book contains a scathing portrait of publishing itself, ‘an industry that secretly hated books and writers’, as seen by a moderately successful player in that world. Ayush despises the whole hypocritical trade, in which literary quality is reduced to mere window-dressing.

Behind the deceitful window, what everyone would really like to publish are celebrity biographies and bestsellers. But the performance of literariness is important and does vital cultural work (i.e. economic work): it pushes the definition of literary towards whatever sells. Ayush knows that the convergence, unlike the Rapture, is going to occur any day now. Maybe it has already happened, but he’s still here, playing the old game because it still has residual value. Soon it won’t.

Critics don’t focus on what is important, to judge by a reference to ‘the sentence-fetishisers’ obligatory para of picking out holes and infelicities in the prose that they think passes for book-reviewing’. There is a herd mentality: ‘Publicists work hard for authors who are already successful, well-known; in fact, the more famous an author is, the more publicists work for them, the more attention these writers get, the more famous they become, in a nice, cosy circular feedback loop.’ Conversely, a book that everyone had ‘believed in’ becomes a pariah when the chief fiction-buyer of the biggest bookshop chain decides not to ‘get behind it’. Ayush’s relatively secure position in the publishing firm where he works as an editor derives from two successes: a crime novel set in the Punjabi communities of Birmingham that became a bestseller and a first novel that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Mukherjee himself benefited from such a shortlisting for his second novel, The Lives of Others (2014), and though biting the hand that feeds you is a noble tradition, there’s always the possibility of breaking a tooth.

It’s risky to foreground a character for whom editing is not just a professional tool but a primary way of interpreting life. Ayush understands emotional conflict in terms of drafts to be harmonised, at one point dismissing the idea that he is displacing a feeling of crisis, but then moderating his resistance to this notion. He is familiar with ‘a related theory from editing – often, the problem on page 172 is not a problem on page 172 but something that needs fixing on page 46 and the issue on the later page is no longer a problem.’ This tends to undermine the reality of the crisis being described. He reacts to family life as if it is a manuscript in need of attention:

Ayush, uncontrollably, lets out a cackle that sounds like a staccato yowl: seriously, if this had been happening in one of his authors’ books, he would have written ‘RE, take one out, you can’t have both, esp. so close together’ in the margin with his blue pencil – RE is ‘Repeated Example’ – but this is not a book and reality does not have to satisfy certain conditions of realism, which is, after all, a highly artificial model of the mess that is life.

Ayush thinks non-fiction publishing is in denial of diversity. A topic as basic as the creation of life is racialised: ‘white women believed that motherhood was both original and endlessly interesting; a form of cultural narcissism.’ At a commissioning meeting ‘two non-fiction debuts are given the green light with almost indecent eagerness – one, a book on new motherhood, another on why the author made the “life choice” of not becoming a mother. Both by white women, Ayush notes; reproduction is clearly hot.’ Even when a subject is historically racialised, such as colonialism and its legacies, the industry prefers to hear from white voices, as if they would be better able to achieve balance:

Had the writer been brown or black, they [newspapers and magazines] would turn down the publicity team’s pitches, because a) they are not interested in yet another writer of colour being angry, and b) they think writers of colour are good for adding, well, colour, with immigration stories, family suffering, family sagas, colourful cultural stuff, but not for contributing to intellectual history, or theories of practices which are the domain of white people, or even their property.

Nevertheless, as a fiction editor he’s dismayed to find that the proportion of books by authors from racial minorities he is offered greatly increases after the shortlisting of his non-white author (any other outcome would be surprising), as if he was now regarded primarily in the light of cultural politics and not literary acumen. He is therefore heartened to be offered a debut collection of stories that display a remarkable range of tone and subject matter. The snag, though Ayush also finds it seductive, is that this new and very promising writer, ‘M.N. Opie’, refuses to jump through the hoops of book promotion, will discuss editorial matters over email but avoids social media and will volunteer no personal information, not even a gender.

This is, if not professional suicide, then a form of self-harm. On rare occasions invisibility can become part of an author’s mystique, whether that invisibility is absolute (B. Traven), relative (Thomas Pynchon) or precarious (Elena Ferrante), but there has to be a readership in place first. These days self-promotion, the business of presenting to the world your trauma or cheekbones (ideally both), is not optional, as real-life examples can prove: Mountains of the Moon, an outstanding debut novel by I.J. Kay, would have had more chance of commercial success in 2012 if its author had been willing or able to play the game.

Emancipated for once from the obligation to read fiction through the lens of a mediated profile of the author, Ayush rediscovers some of the lost pleasures of literature. His mental image of M.N. Opie changes from story to story:

sometimes it’s a black man, sometimes a white woman, at other times a black woman … an Indian woman. Academic. Caribbean (woman, no, man, no, woman, again). British Jamaican. White British. British Asian. Migratory bird. Not British at all, just a naturalised Caribbean or Asian. Not naturalised. Immigrant. Guest. Foreigner. Traveller. Temporary leave to remain … You’re free to picture him however you want: it’s a mirror held up to your own face.

Quite how publishing could accommodate both a corrective cultural politics in the realm of non-fiction and an approach to fiction indifferent to questions of identity is hard to imagine, particularly given the trend for what Ayush calls ‘zeitgeisty, crapulous “autofiction”’, but that doesn’t invalidate them as ambitions. Meanwhile, he does what he can to bolster the jacket copy for another fiction debut. But his chosen accolade – ‘exposing the ever-renewing, more hectic forms of erasure of labour under late capitalism’ – seems to offer the worst of both worlds, trying to lift a novel in the marketplace by burdening it with a dogmatic agenda. Meanwhile M.N. Opie’s story collection, Yes, the World, undefiled by the required ‘shitshow’ of author photo, author bio and lit fest appearances, vanishes without a trace.

Ayush’s justified pessimism about his professional world shades into hysteria when he characterises writers and publishers as murderous by definition: ‘How can butchers and pigs be on the same side?’ A more accurate description, though one that doesn’t stray from the carnivorous context, would see publishers and authors as corresponding in their functions with the contributions that chickens and pigs make to a full English breakfast. Publishers provide the equivalent of an egg, a real expenditure of resources but something that can be replaced, while authors offer up slices of themselves.

Ayush lives with his husband, Luke, and their five-year-old twins, Sasha and Masha. On the first page of Choice, Luke is abroad and Ayush settles himself between Sasha and Masha in their bed. Instead of a bedtime story he shows them footage, secretly filmed by activists, of industrially farmed animals. ‘The threshold, raised by an inch or so above floor level, is so caked with layers of old solidified blood and fresh new infusion that it looks like a large wedge of fudgy chocolate cake. At the centre of the screen are slaughtered pigs.’ The twins don’t like it. A pig stands up ‘in the stew of bodies. Somehow, they have missed him. He has been showered so thoroughly with his companions’ blood that it is difficult to make out his tiny eyes of contrasting colour.’ They really don’t like it. Ayush wonders if he should stay with the twins until they go to sleep, though his feet will stick out past the end of the bed. The chapter ends before he has decided whether to steel himself for this inconvenience or not.

Luke, an economist and staunch defender of capitalism, has been away at a conference in the States, but before long is taking his turn making dinner. He is stern with the children when they try to dispose of the sausages that used to be their favourite food by giving them to the family dog: ‘How many times have I told you that you’re not to feed Spencer? How many times? Do you understand that it’s bad for him? Would you like him to get heart disease and die? Would you like him to get fat and ill and suffer and die? Would you? Answer me.’ Poor Sasha, poor Masha. They seem fated to kill animals one way or another. Daddy’s angry, and Baba doesn’t defend them. He says nothing.

The twins’ behaviour at school begins to cause concern – they’ve been talking to their classmates about animals screaming and dying in pain, they’ve been pretending to vomit over other children’s lunchboxes. Both fathers are asked to attend a meeting to address these concerns. To Ayush’s relief, Luke is unimpressed by the teacher’s waffle about diversity, which is motivated presumably by a desire not to single out an unconventional household. ‘That fool,’ he says afterwards. ‘Do they come from central casting? Is this how they’re taught to speak in teacher training school?’ It’s a rare moment of harmony between the fathers, though it’s hard to think the school was wrong in detecting a problem.

Ayush and Luke have been together for 25 years, but they would only be mentioned in Tim Clausen’s Love Together: Longtime Male Couples on Healthy Intimacy and Communication (2014) as a terrible warning. Ayush doesn’t own up to showing the abattoir film to the children, though Luke eventually works out what he did and takes him off bedtime story duty. Their worldviews are caricaturally opposed, with Luke constantly repeating that ‘economics is life, life is economics’ while Ayush pleads for the value of what can’t be measured. One day they argue so fiercely in the car that the twins start to whimper in the back. Spencer the dog places himself at their feet as if they are physically under attack. For its first hundred pages Choice might be satire of a bleak sort, showing a non-standard parenting couple making grotesque mistakes, the point being to test the reader’s reflexive liberalism. When exactly will you stop letting your fear of being thought homophobic paralyse your judgment? (I attempted some such mischief in my novel Box Hill.) Discussing Alan Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star when it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994, Germaine Greer remarked that reaction to the novel would have been rather different if the narrator’s love object, the young man whose tutor he is, had been female. These days there can be a blanket acceptance of behaviour that half a century ago would have been condemned no less unthinkingly. It’s still a double standard even when it seems to benefit you.

The idea that the novel might be a satire doesn’t hold up; what’s on offer is something murkier and more distorted. What is the basis of this couple? Only a blindingly sexual connection could explain their getting together and staying that way. There’s a single rather jarring hint of this, a brief reminiscence of a holiday nearly twenty years before when ‘the bed-linen towards the checkout time at the Aldeburgh bed and breakfast [was] almost steaming with their mingled juices.’ There is some residual affection, expressed in the reassurance of arm squeezing when tension is high, even a moment when Ayush lets himself be ‘enfolded’ (so as to make Luke stop talking), but no sense of a real bond. On a family outing to Epping Forest Ayush looks for the positives in his life partner. He doesn’t come up with much:

He knows about beechnuts. Very few economists do. I must not forget that. He knows that beechnuts provide food to deer and pigs. He knows that if a novelist sets a sex scene under a beech tree, that novelist knows very little about nature since the shade under a beech tree is the most uncomfortable place to lie upon because of its carpet of burrs.

This is an account of a faltering relationship, but the account itself is no less faltering. The frame keeps changing, with crucial information being belatedly added in a way that undermines the overall picture. It is mentioned early on, for instance, that Luke is the bigger earner, but the information that he comes from a rich family comes later (his father is a former banker, his mother inherited wealth). When Luke says, to escape a confrontation, that he’ll take the children to his parents for the weekend, a new aspect of the family dynamic puts in a sudden appearance. What do his parents make of the set-up, and of Ayush? And how do Ayush’s family feel? Apart from the information that his father was brought up in Calcutta, they don’t reach the page. If Choice is a hard book to get the measure of the reason is the thinness of its exposition, the consistent withholding of context.

It’s not that the bar should be set higher for unconventional arrangements, though it has to be said that gay people don’t usually have children by mistake. They can reasonably be expected, before starting a family, to have given the matter some thought. In one department Ayush and Luke pass with flying colours. As the smaller earner, Ayush has greater responsibility for running the household. They don’t delegate childcare. There is no nanny, no one to take the twins to school or to pick them up. They don’t pay someone to do the cleaning. It’s true that Ayush has an obsessive-compulsive side, using a ruler to measure place settings even for everyday suppers, and might not be able to accept another person’s presence or habits, but it’s still possible to detect a whiff of principle.

One day the twins ambush Ayush with questions about their two-dad family. They have been told by schoolmates that it’s wrong. He fences for a while, saying they don’t have two dads, they have a Dad and a Baba – he’s much less forthright in telling them where they come from than in talking to them about abattoirs. Then he adopts the everyone-is-different tone that was deemed inadequate earlier in the book, when a teacher was trying to sound authoritative without committing herself to anything: ‘What is better, only one colour … or what we have now, all different colours to different things?’ Clashes of opinion can be healthy. ‘Some things are wrong to some people, and to others not. Let us take an example. You, Sash, and I think that eating meat is wrong, but Daddy doesn’t think so.’ He doesn’t acknowledge a difference between his own dietary philosophy, embraced at his own pace, and the aversion therapy, laden with guilt and horror, that he imposed on the twins.

Three years​ have passed, and Ayush is back reading bedtime stories. Now, in the children’s phase of uncertainty, might be a good moment to regroup, with the help of a book like Gareth Peter’s My Daddies!, Mel Elliot’s The Girl with Two Dads or Michael Joosten’s My Two Dads and Me – never mind that they’re intended for a younger age group. Time to consolidate their sense of themselves. Instead he reads to them about the early life of the Buddha. Better that they should learn detachment than be confirmed in the life that has been chosen for them.

Choice is made up of three sections or panels, but it’s the first part of any book that will determine the reader’s relationship with it. The second part seems free-standing, but turns out to be one of M.N. Opie’s stories, which was described earlier on from Ayush’s point of view:

There is a long story about a young Eng. Lit. academic named Emily – an early modernist, no less – in a London university who is in a car accident returning home from a dinner party one night. The driver of the car is not who the app says he is. A combination of inertia, procrastination and maybe even an inchoate strategy only half-known to herself sends Emily’s life in an unpredictable direction. Everything about the story is unexpected and it is not the plot. It is the inner voice of the protagonist, the representation of her world of work and her mind.

Readers don’t expect a novel’s cover copy to map onto the contents with any authority, but an intramural endorsement of this sort has more force, though it’s hard to factor out the perverse reflex of resisting something just because you’ve been told to admire it. In fact Emily’s story has a similar shape to Ayush’s. They’re both employed by institutions (publishing house, university) that claim to serve the values of high culture but sabotage them more surely every year. Subjective experiences of value are being nibbled at by algorithms and metrics, and the kernel of quality jettisoned in favour of the husk of performance indicators. Both characters are driven by an obscure crisis to drastic action, and the pacing of both narratives is uncertain. In Ayush’s section there are a couple of false climaxes, moments when he takes the risk of speaking out (rebuking his employers for their tokenism, telling a first novelist what she’s letting herself in for), which turn out, after a page or so, to be fantasies – ‘Of course, none of this happens.’ It’s a gimmick that risks making the reader doubt every dramatic event, raising tension locally but lowering it globally.

Emily finds some family papers that contain surprising information – her grandparents founded and endowed a school in India for the children of tea estate workers – and might be a basis for a new departure in her writing, but the project, and the plot strand that goes with it, fizzles out. Each protagonist has a friend whose only function in the novel is to serve as a sounding board, providing information or advice. Ayush has Ritika, an economist with a humane perspective that is very welcome, providentially met when he accompanies Luke to a business function. Emily, meanwhile, has her friend the novelist Rohan, beneficiary of not one but two Booker Prize shortlistings.

There aren’t many novels to which the title Choice could not be attached, and it isn’t clear what makes it particularly appropriate here, shorn of an article, as stark as an abstract noun can be. The subject might seem more accurately to be displacement. Emily knows she should report the accident, in which a child and a dog were injured, perhaps seriously, and haunts the area where it happened in case she spots a police sign asking for information. Finally there is one, but still she does nothing, and doesn’t mention the sign to Rohan, who would certainly insist on her taking action. Instead she becomes involved in the family of the driver, Salim, who was illegally deputising for his sick brother. She hears Salim’s life story in some detail – childhood in Eritrea, forced conscription as a teenager, month-long walk to Sudan, indentured labour, people traffickers – and comes to feel that it is hers to tell. As Ayush interprets M.N. Opie’s story about Emily, its ‘chief meaning’ was ‘entirely unwritten’: ‘no escape was offered by making what one thought was the correct moral choice.’ It’s conceptually difficult to quarrel with an assessment made by a fictional character of a story within a story, based on something absent from the text – but how is it the correct moral choice for a witness to ignore the victims of a road accident she has not reported, and to take a crypto-biographical interest in the person responsible for that accident?

The first two sections of Choice are set in London and the last in rural India, where Sabita, a mother of two with a less than reliable husband whose working life takes him far away from home, is selected by a charity to receive a cow. It could transform the family’s life, but she will have to find it grazing, and it won’t produce milk unless it has a calf. How is that supposed to happen? The cow is both a status symbol, about which her children want to boast to their friends, and a burden if not actually a curse.

This is by far the most successful section in the book. The focus has to be tight – Sabita doesn’t have the option of discussing her plight with anyone but must try to manage an impossible situation. Occasionally she achieves a tiny triumph. Might she be able to make cakes out of cow dung, and sell them for fuel? The technique of shaping them so that they dry properly escapes her and the cakes slip off the wall however hard she slaps them into place, but then there’s a moment of something like grace: ‘She picks up a fallen cake and, hand shaking with fury, does a swift double-slap against the wall, so quick that it could be one movement, but it’s actually broken into two. She stares at it, willing it to take. And it does … Superstitiously, she repeats that motion with the second patty, then the third. Both of them adhere to the wall. So that was it, a trick to the slapping movement.’

This section works in isolation, as an examination of the human costs exacted by what is in theory a philanthropic venture. Technically it isn’t free-standing but opens out of the first section, dramatising a social experiment Ayush was told about by his unlikely friend Ritika, during one of their dinners together. ‘Random women in randomly selected villages in a district in West Bengal were each given a cow to improve their lot. It was a stupendous success: consumption – the metric used by economists to measure wellbeing among the ultra poor – went up and continued to hold up at the raised level two years after the asset transfer.’

The friendship with Ritika doesn’t feel plausible because so much emphasis has been placed on the unrelenting nature of parental duties, the loss of ‘time, money, leisure, available energy, the slack and the buffer zones that make life bearable’. Yet when Luke asks Ayush to accompany him to the party where he meets Ritika, his request has the breeziness of the unencumbered: ‘Just come and smile and make small talk, which you’re so good at, then we’ll leave, and I’ll take you out for dinner to the Delaunay, or wherever you want to go. Please?’

Luke had pointed Ayush out to Ritika as someone with whom she might have common ground, but for the two of them to socialise without Luke is a different matter. If Luke isn’t self-sacrificingly at home with the children wouldn’t he expect to be included? Ayush and Luke in these episodes not only have freedom from family responsibilities but a more relaxed attitude towards each other. Even if it turned out that there was supplementary childcare on tap, one partner’s cultivation of a separate relationship with a work colleague of the other would risk destabilising a harmonious marriage – and this is anything but that. Either the characters’ commitment to parenthood or the novel’s commitment to realism is taking time off.

When he hears about the free-cow scheme, Ayush is immediately attuned to its failures, asking what happened in the tiny fraction of cases (less than 1 per cent) where it didn’t yield benefits. Ritika temporises, and the section ends immediately afterwards, with this cryptic sentence: ‘Something has just begun to take shape in his mind.’ This seems to hint that he writes the account of just such a failure, but his transformation from publisher to writer, like so much in the book, is off-page and unguessable.

Ayush and his creator​ are entitled to their pessimism, but the withering perspective on a project that achieves its goals a mere 99 per cent of the time takes the rejection of economic logic rather far, coming close to the suggestion that any intervention in the lives of others is doomed. Yet in the account Emily hears of Salim’s life, two successive sentences from the time he was on the point of deportation argue the opposite: ‘On one occasion the pilot refused to fly with a forcible deportation case on board his flight. On another, a 19-year-old Swedish activist, alerted by her group that there were “removals” on the plane, refused to sit down, so they couldn’t take off.’ As a result he was able to stay in Britain. There seems no room in the novel’s scheme for actions that are either disinterested or effective. Better to leave these incidents out than to include them, when their testimony against the book’s bleak thesis is so persuasive.

The section about the devastating gift of a cow is powerful, but less so than the book’s opening scene, when Ayush shows the abattoir footage to his five-year-olds. If he hasn’t traumatised them, it’s not for lack of trying. Will Sasha and Masha as adults pass Carrie Fisher’s test for having been adequately parented, by being able to pay for their own therapy? It’s anyone’s guess. Of course there’s nothing new about starting a book with a shocking scene, the high-culture equivalent of clickbait. Even in a debased cultural climate reviewers and prize juries can be trusted to read the first few pages. The opening of Choice certainly has impact (that fetish word of assessment protocols), but so does a roadside bomb or an own goal. It’s not necessarily a good thing.

Ayush has many worries, about whether eight is too young for Luke to teach the children about prime numbers, for one. He’s kept awake at night by Luke using too much water to cook pasta but has no qualms about showing Sasha and Masha abattoir footage. Why didn’t he just read them Violet Plum’s I’m not dinner!, or Real Superheroes Eat Tofu by P.K. Sprout, or Flora Lee’s No Green Eggs or Ham? If the twins must be educated by way of a screen he could have shown them Babe, a film that has shepherded generations of children towards vegetarianism without psychic damage or significant disruption of school mealtimes. Why would a snuff movie be a parent’s first resort?

This is an act of cruelty to children dressed up as kindness to animals, but the twins can’t be its primary target since they didn’t put the sausages on their own plates. They are being punished in Luke’s place, though he doesn’t seem to notice. Had Ayush suggested a change in the family’s diet to Luke? It’s perfectly possible for a novel to condemn its central character by indirect means, but this can’t apply to Choice because of its habit of ignoring if not ostracising the reader, holding back basic information about Ayush’s circumstances. The cards are still being dealt, so how can the game have started?

Non-standard parenting arrangements are exactly that, non-standard. There’s no set pattern, no single template. Since 2002 same-sex couples have been eligible to adopt. As for surrogacies, some take place within friendship networks, in others there is an element of compensation. Some are nakedly commercial transactions. There’s no indication of where Luke and Ayush’s household stands. Ayush worries that the non-white characteristics increasingly visible in the children as they grow will trigger the racism he himself experienced, and so the implication seems to be that they are genetically his. That the features are described first as ‘East Asian’ and then explicitly Thai doesn’t line up smoothly with a father raised in Calcutta, but it doesn’t disprove a link. Ayush does project his own experience onto the children, in a way so caricatural as briefly to revive the possibility of satire. He considers playground mockery of physical features relatively trivial:

that kind [of thing] can and will be easily laughed off, more or less. The kind he is worried about is the one that takes the form of white liberal inclusiveness and its regular need to be fellated: come and be the one non-white judge on this book-prize jury because, look, we’re so diverse; come and speak at our famous literature festival, but only to its ethnic chapter that happens at a different time of year from the main festival.

It shows consistency that he should find adult injuries more scarring than those inflicted in childhood.

Exposition delayed is exposition denied. There’s an odd moment when it’s mentioned in passing that Ayush’s only contribution to the family was naming the children (‘everything else had been Luke’s preference’), which he does as if it were a parlour game, choosing names – Alexander, Marielle – that can be made to yield the Russian-sounding diminutives that chime with his literary tastes. This piece of backstory arrives almost literally at the back of the story, when Ayush’s section of the book is nearly over, with twenty pages to go. Still later (eight pages to go) comes the news that he never wanted children, in fact he sees not having children as one of the ‘very few advantages of homosexuality’, but he had capitulated to Luke’s wishes. Finally, with six pages to go, ‘the mother’ gets a single mention, as a barely personified uterus, in the context of Ayush’s relief that her ‘Thai phenotype’ did not manifest itself immediately in the babies she bore Luke. What was that about the erasure of female labour under late capitalism? As a publisher, Ayush would be well placed to commission a book about the commodification of the womb, and the practice of renting productive space inside a stranger’s body. Reproduction isn’t a ‘hot’ subject when it concerns exploitable women, usually non-white, whose only currency is their fertility, and such a book would fit well with his stated politics. But he might prefer not to read it.