When Your Every Decision Feels Torturous
When I got pregnant last year, I began reading online about parenting and found myself confronted with an overwhelming quantity of choices. On social media, how-to graphics and videos abound, as do doctrines about the one true way to discipline your children, or feed them, or get them to sleep through the night. Parent forums, blogs, and product-recommendation sites are full of suggestions for the only swaddle that works, the formula that tastes milkiest, the clicking animatronic crab that will get your tummy-time-averse baby to hold her head high. Scrolling through all of this advice can make it seem as though parenting is largely about informed, research-based decision-making—that choosing the right gadgets and the right philosophy will help parenting itself go right.
This logic can feel particularly visceral for a parent considering how to be a good steward of the environment. (Do I genuinely need a special $160 blender to avoid giving my baby prepackaged food? Or can I just mash steamed veggies with a fork?) Worrying about waste can turn into a variation on the pursuit of perfect parenting—but not worrying about it is illogical. Our children will inherit the climate crisis. Personal decisions cannot undo that fact; can, indeed, hardly mitigate it. Deciding to be a parent anyway means you had better hope that our species and societies can work out a new way to thrive on a changing, warming, conflict-riddled planet—because if not, what have you done?
Choice, the Booker Prize–nominated writer Neel Mukherjee’s fourth novel, addresses this question head-on. It’s a triptych novel in the vein of Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise and Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry, which use their three parts to repeatedly surprise and challenge readers. Compared with these novels, Choice is both more ambitious and less successful, harmed by the fact that its second and third sections just cannot compete with its blistering first.
But that first section is a barn burner. Mukherjee starts Choice with the story of Ayush, an editor at a prestigious London publishing house, whose obsession with the climate crisis lands somewhere between religious fervor and emotional disorder—especially as far as his kids are concerned. Ayush and his economist husband, Luke, have twin children, Masha and Sasha, and his portion of Choice is a beautiful, horrifying, detailed, and messy evocation of parenthood, full of diapers and dirty dishes and “Can you help Daddy make dinner?” It also presents having children as a moral crisis, a stumbling block Ayush can’t get past. He tries bitterly to lessen his family’s consumption—we see him measuring the exact amount of water in which to cook the twins’ pasta, boiling it in the electric kettle because he’s read that it uses less energy than a stovetop pot —but he can’t get away from the belief that Masha and Sasha are “not going to have a future anyway.” His conviction that they’re doomed weighs more and more heavily on his parenting decisions, eventually convincing him that he can no longer parent at all.
Readers meet Ayush in a scene nearly too painful to read. Home alone with his kindergarten-age twins, Ayush skips their bedtime story in favor of a documentary about an abattoir. Mukherjee describes this moment in vivid visual detail, contrasting the children’s sweet bedroom decor (cherries on the bedding; sea creatures on the night-light) to the laptop screen, which shows slaughtered pigs on a floor “so caked with layers of old solidified blood and fresh new infusion that it looks like a large wedge of fudgy chocolate cake.” Unsurprisingly, the twins sob hysterically as the video plays; their distress upsets Ayush so acutely that he cannot talk. But rather than comfort them once he regains speech, he doubles down on the decision that he has to teach them about cruelty to animals—and about their complicity in it. He puts his children to bed not with an apology or a lullaby, but with the stern reminder that “what you saw was how our meat comes to us.”
[Read: The books that help me raise children in a broken world]
Ayush seems like a monster in this scene—and not an unfeeling one, which signals to the reader that he may be as much tortured as torturer. Mukherjee swiftly makes it apparent that this is the case. We see him begging Luke to help teach their too-young children to weigh the morality of “things that don’t appear to be choices,” such as eating meat; Luke, in turn, begs Ayush to examine the roots of his unhappiness and anxiety, his compulsion to conserve energy far beyond what could reasonably be useful. Ayush yearns to “shake off his human form” and become one with nature—or, more ominously, vanish into it. At one point, Ayush takes his children to explore some woods outside London, an activity that many parents might relate to: He wants to share the wonder of the natural world with his children, both as a bonding activity and as a lesson in ecological stewardship. But he can’t focus on Masha and Sasha. What he hears instead is that the “great trees are breathing; Ayush wants to still his heart to hear them.” Mukherjee only implies this, but it seems that all Ayush’s experiences lead to this paradox: His love for the Earth makes him want to erase himself from it.
Ayush’s relationship with his children is also shaped by a desire to remove himself, as well as a significant amount of attendant guilt. He is the twins’ primary parent, despite the fact that he never wanted children—a revelation that Mukherjee builds to slowly. Ayush’s anxieties about choosing parenthood are legion. He’s upset by the ecological impact of adding to the Earth’s human population, and believes that his twins will face a future of walled cities and climate refugeeism. Having grown up South Asian in Britain, he’s frightened of exposing children to the racism he’s faced his whole life; he also has a half-buried but “fundamental discomfort about gay parenting,” of which he is ashamed. Most of all, before having children, he didn’t want to have a baby who could become like him—“a consumed, jittery, unsettled creature.” His own unhappiness, he feels, should have precluded him from having children. Yet he acquiesced, a choice he partly disavows by suppressing his memory of why he did. Not only does he go along with having children; he takes daily responsibility for raising them.
On the surface, this is the case because Ayush earns less than Luke, a dynamic the novel explores with nuance. In straight partnerships, the question of who parents more is very often gendered, which Mukherjee acknowledges: At one point, Luke, who has a big job and generational wealth, dismisses Ayush with a sexist reference to the “pin-money” he earns in publishing. But there are more layers here. Ayush, it seems, takes responsibility for his children in order to atone for not having wanted them. Luke, who pushed for fatherhood, is the more patient and affectionate parent, while Ayush is busy fretting over the environmental impact of disposable diapers. Luke is also much kinder and more open to Ayush than Ayush is to him: Although Luke is an economist, with a genuine belief in the rationality that undergirds his discipline, he’s motivated far more by his emotions than his ideas.
Ayush believes himself to be the opposite. His domestic decisions are often logical (or logical-seeming) responses to climate anxieties, but this impulse becomes more disturbing as it influences his child-rearing. Sometimes, he seems to care more about raising Masha and Sasha as environmentalists than he does about any other aspect of their upbringing—almost as though he wants to offset having had them to begin with. He doesn’t necessarily want to be this way: After the somewhat-failed forest outing, Ayush takes the twins on a walk around London and teaches them to come up with similes and metaphors to describe what they see, making a game of comparing dandelions to egg yolks and lemons. Here, he successfully keeps his attention on his children, but he still spins a tender moment into one of moral exigency. “Will this remain in their memory,” he wonders, “make them look up and out, make them notice, and, much more importantly, notice again?” For Ayush, this qualifies as optimism. He’s trying to control his children’s way of seeing the world, but he is also trying to offer them the gift of coexisting, happily, with the Earth.
[Read: The book that captures my life as a dad]
Mukherjee does give Ayush one way of communing peacefully with nature: his relationship with his dog, Spencer. The writer Joy Williams has said that any work of fiction should have an “animal within to give its blessing,” which Spencer certainly does in Choice. Mukherjee describes Ayush’s devotion to his dog in lush detail; the book’s most beautiful passages have Spencer in them. Ayush’s heart breaks when he realizes that Luke does not see “you, me, and the dog” as family enough; it breaks far more deeply when Spencer grows too old to “bound to the door … surprised by joy, impatient as the wind, when any member of his family comes in.” Among Ayush’s most treasured memories is a spring morning with Spencer: Then a puppy, he had rolled in wild flowers so that his “silky golden throat and chest had smelled of violets for a brief second, then the scent had disappeared. Ayush had sat on the ground, sniffing Spencer’s chest for another hit of that elusive perfume, but it was gone.”
Ayush plainly sees Spencer as his child, and yet the dog also gives him a way to experience the “elusive perfume” of a pleasurable connection with the planet. As Spencer ages and that link is harder to sense, Ayush’s unhappiness grows. He understands that he is grieving preemptively for Spencer, but the approaching loss of his dog—an event he cannot control or avoid—does not motivate him to snuggle with Spencer or prepare his children for the loss. Instead, it makes him want to leave his family when Spencer does—as if, without the connection to nature that the dog offers, he can no longer bear to be caged in his family home.
By the end of his section of Choice, Ayush has completely lost the ability to make rational decisions. He betrays Spencer in a scene perhaps even more painful than the book’s opening, thinking that he’s doing his beloved dog a service; he also betrays his children, his husband, his life. All of his efforts to control his family’s ecological impact, to do the right research and calculations, to impart all the right moral lessons, lead directly, maybe inexorably, to this tragic point. At the novel’s start, he tells Luke that he wants their kids to understand “choices and their consequences.” But it ultimately becomes clear that he can’t accept the consequences of his choice to have children. He can’t save the planet for his children; nor can he save it from them—and so, rather than committing to guiding them into a future he can’t choose or control, he abdicates his responsibility for them.
Mukherjee leaves Ayush’s family behind rather than linger on the aftermath of these betrayals. He moves on to two narratives the reader will recognize as parts of books that Ayush edited: first a story about a young English academic who begins meddling in—and writing about—the life of an Eritrean rideshare driver, then an essay by a disillusioned economist who describes the misery that ensues when an aid organization gives a Bengali family a cow that is meant to lift them from poverty, but radically worsens their situation instead. Mukherjee imbues these sections with a propulsive mix of anger and grace, but neither is especially complicated. Emily, the academic, has no one who depends on her, and her odd choices concerning the rideshare driver, Salim, have no real consequences for anyone but herself. Sabita, the mother of the family that gets the cow, is so wholly at the mercy of her material conditions that choice is hardly a relevant concept to her—something that she understands, though the cow-providing “people from the city” do not.
Emily’s section primarily serves as a portrait of choice amid abundance. Sabita’s, meanwhile, underscores the central idea of Ayush’s: that our efforts at control are, by and large, delusions. For parents, this can be especially painful to accept. We want our choices to guarantee our children’s safety, their comfort, their happiness. For Ayush, who believes fervently that his twins will grow up to inhabit a “burning world,” the fact that he can’t choose something better for them drives him away from them. By not showing the consequences of Ayush’s actions, Mukherjee leaves incomplete the book’s exploration of parenting. What his abdication means to Masha, Sasha, and Luke is hidden. What it means to the reader, though, is clear. In Choice, there is no such thing as a perfect decision or a decision guaranteed to go right. There are only misjudgments and errors—and the worst of those are the ones that can never be undone.