Neel Mukherjee’s "Choice" is a novel full of characters deciding how much truth to tell. As in "The Lives of Others," the author’s 2014 Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, we are confronted with subtle, powerful narratives within narratives exploring the gap between wealth and poverty, myopia and activism, fact and fiction. But here these themes deepen into an exploration of free will. A line from V.S. Naipaul’s "In a Free State" comes to mind: “The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves."
In the first of the novel’s three parts, we follow a South Asian man named Ayush. The lie he is telling himself is that he can control his career, his family, his future. As the editorial director at a London publishing house, he reports to a white woman “reputed to have a ‘nose for a winner’” — but the press is called Sewer, and Ayush can’t “shake off the feeling that he is their diversity box, ticked.”
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