Neel Mukherjee was born in India in 1970, but has lived in the UK since studying at Oxford in the 1990s. He also teaches creative writing at Harvard. His debut novel A Life Apart (2008) won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for best fiction, and his second The Lives of Others, set among a wealthy but politically left-wing family in late Sixties Kolkata (then Calcutta), was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2014. Choice is his fourth novel and, like the sprawling The Lives of Others and his third book A State of Freedom (2018), plays with the form by splitting its ideas across multiple perspectives.
In the first section, we meet an existentially conflicted editor, Ayush, who is, along with his same-sex partner, a father of adopted twins living in south London. In the second, a young academic called Emily has a traumatic, life-changing experience in a taxi driven by Salim, who turns out to be an undocumented migrant to the UK. And the third takes place in rural Bengal: Sabita’s poor family are gifted a cow by Western economists to help develop themselves out of poverty. Each part is linked thematically by the characters’ helplessness among the confused ethics that govern our global societies. Mukherjee is challenging the reader to think about how our readerly empathies develop, and about the hidden economic principles that so many of our life choices are contingent on.
The novelist, film-maker and 2024 Goldsmiths Prize judge Xiaolu Guo described Choice as “truly ambitious and compelling fiction from an author at the height of his powers”.
Barney Horner: The Goldsmiths Prize was set up to reward fiction that “breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form”. What can an “innovative” approach offer the reader (and writer) that a more conventional novel might not?
Neel Mukherjee: A welcome break from the unvarying meat, potatoes, and two veg of the mainstream realist novel? Aren’t we all, readers and writers, thoroughly tired of yet another storybook, another novel about “my extraordinary family story I didn’t know about”, or the complications of desire, or the story + emotional payload + beginning-middle-end + Fine Prose kind of book that has been pushed on us as “masterpieces”? Can we stretch our wings – and minds – a little?
Choice is split into three sections. Which part did you write first, and did it directly inspire the others? Or were they conceived as a trio?
This is easy: I wrote the second section first (Emily’s story), but while I was writing it, I knew what sections one and two were going to be. I had set section two in the US but I hit a wall with researching some healthcare matters so decided to shift the whole thing to the UK. While section two languished for a while, unfinished, I began section one. Section three was the last one I wrote: it came out of me, uninterrupted – my god, how rare is that? And I finished that section in three months.
You’ve said elsewhere that you want to reclaim the “political novel”.
We already know how institutions such as the CIA in postwar US, particularly during the Cold War period, engaged in proactive efforts to fund, disseminate, proselytise and propagandise for literature and art that they thought would effectively counter the influence of the “socialist realism” of Soviet/communist state-approved art. It would be impossible for me to go into the whole history of this, but suffice it to say that in its way, this American counteroffensive, secretive, nebulous, pervasive, was to become far more successful than [the Soviet doctrine of] Zhdanovism in the tenuous and long hold it exercised – exercises, still – over how the novel form moved away from the social and political to concentrate on the individual – on relationships, divorce, adultery, all floating free of the matrix within which all human lives unfold, ie, politics.
The aim was to make the word “political” dirty, partisan, unacceptable, in much the same way that American institutions worked out how to make the word “feminist” a dirty word, as Susan Faludi wrote in Backlash, so that women themselves would internalise the hatred of that term and all that the feminist revolution entailed. More than half the battle is won if you can alienate a movement’s adherents by owning its terms and concepts. Look at the sanction on saying anything “political” at arts awards ceremonies – or anywhere – in the US. This has been one of the most studiedly political cultural revolutions of the 20th century, this steady tarring and feathering of the very concept of political.
The political novel is now seen as humourless slogan-shouting, placard-bearing agitprop, insulated from human complexity and nuance and from interpretive plenitude. I wanted Choice to push back against that ideological position by attempting to show how all our behaviour, our choices, our notions of agency, our constraints are all always-already – I use this in the Althusserian sense of the term – political. How is Gilead not a political novel? How is The Handmaid’s Tale not? Or Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet? Or Ghachar Ghochar?
Many of the characters in Choice seem to have their life choices limited, obliquely or not, by the vagaries of market economics. Do you think political instability stems from a crisis of individual agency?
Well, it seems to be the case, doesn’t it? I would add: the crisis of individual agency aggregated results in political instability. I was interested in thinking through how the much-fetishised notion of choice is actually a chimera under late capitalism.
There is a question in Choice, most evident in the second part, in which a white woman tries to uncover and record the story of an Eritrean family that has migrated to the UK, about who can tell which stories. How can the contemporary novel broach this question?
By questioning it, of course. As you can tell, I had to do this carefully, hence the several levels of framing: a story told by a person whose narrative is then researched, expanded upon and written by the person to whom the story is told. (And the choice Emily makes to tell Salim’s story is morally compromised on so many levels that it complicates her decision further).
But isn’t all writing some form of appropriation? Do we stop reading Chekhov because he wrote some of the most astonishing stories on 19th-century Russian peasants without being one himself? I wanted readers to ask exactly that question: who can tell which stories, and why. I also had to end the section on a note that would leave readers asking themselves the same question without giving them any answers. Both sides, the anti-appropriation and the more liberal, have their arguments and points: I wanted readers to hold both in their minds without cancelling each other out.
Tell me about a piece of art, literature or music that was important to you when writing Choice.
Brahms’ chamber music, particularly the two clarinet sonatas and the clarinet quintet. All of Nicki Minaj (even the collaboration with 6ix9ine). Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP”. Angela Hewitt’s recordings of Bach’s French Suites and English Suites.
Why do we need the Goldsmiths Prize?
To counter the brand management that most prizes have become. To counter journalism’s takeover of what fiction is and can be and how we understand it.
What past British or Irish novel deserves a retrospective Goldsmiths Prize? And why?
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) and Samuel Beckett’s Watt (1953). Woolf for the wholesale reordering of how thoughts and interiority could be represented in fiction as flow. Beckett for the first novel in which he becomes “Beckettian”, with that fingerprint style and the signature themes. Like so much of Beckett, it’s also a very funny book.
“Choice” by Neel Mukherjee is published by Atlantic Books. The winner of the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize is announced on 6 November. Read more interviews with the shortlisted writers here.
[See also: Mark Bowles: “My book rages against the business-model view of the world”]
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