‘The young end up wanting a new conservatism’

Neel Mukherjee’s novels delve into our moral choices – and how, as he has found on campus, moralising comes too cheaply today

The first part of Neel Mukherjee’s new novel, Choice, features a publisher, Ayush, who is the only non-white editorial staff member. (“He has never been able to shake off the feeling that he is their diversity box, ticked.”) In fact, Ayush, who is of Asian heritage, is sceptical about much of the industry, from the unconsciousbias training to how big publishing houses push commercial interests at the expense of the literary. And, most of all, its embracing of nonwhite writers only if they produce novels about immigrant suffering rather than about ideas – for the latter, as Ayush puts it, “is the domain of white people”.

So, is this what Mukherjee, who was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2014 for The Lives of Others, thinks about British publishing today? “The risk,” he agrees with a wry chuckle, “is that people will say: ‘There goes a sour-grapes writer.’ Choice is not a satire of the publishing industry. But it’s true that the publishing industry is only interested in making money. It hides behind the literary. And it’s true that because I’m Indian [he was born in Kolkata in 1970] and because I once wrote a family saga [The Lives of Others was about a wealthy Kolkata family in the late 1960s], I feel that people are forever expecting me to write another Indian novel about inequality and poverty and oppression.”

Choice – a slyly interlinked triptych whose two further sections feature a white woman writing a novel about an Eritrean taxi driver, and a Western economic experiment in a rural Indian village – is very much a novel about inequality, poverty and oppression. Fundamentally, though, it’s about the way many people in the West experience such things in the abstract. However “consciously” we may pride ourselves on behaving, the novel argues, we ignore how our lifestyle choices can perpetuate such problems in distant countries.

Mukherjee has been writing about the moral implications of individual acts throughout his career, in three critically acclaimed and elegantly constructed novels that have been set variously in Britain and in India, but he agrees that Choice, his fourth, is his most political. “If you say you’ve written a political novel, people assume you are being preachy,” he says. “I’m keen to rescue that term, ‘political’. The idea of the novel that has recently won out in the West is about character destiny and the arcs of individual lives. But I was trying to ask in this book: isn’t to live now in the world an inherently political act?”

His point is that our literature embodies the cultural preoccupations of the current moment. Or, put another way, we get the literature we deserve. This doesn’t reflect well on us if, like Mukherjee, you take a dim view of autofiction, those inward-looking novels that closely resemble the life of their author. “Autofiction is the triumph of the self over the world,” says Mukherjee, with a performative shudder. “There are countries where it would be considered a dubious luxury to be writing navelgazing literature… The novel ought to be looking at the foundations of how we live. Although I do think there are novelists who are thinking very deeply about this: Ali Smith, the French-Senegalese novelist David Diop, the German writer Jenny Erpenbeck.”

Talking to Mukherjee is a delightful experience. He is deliciously opinionated and inspirationally well-read. He lives in south London with his long-term partner, he is an excellent cook – for our interview he has dished up baby leeks, salmon and carrot fritters – and can be fabulously waspish in his views, some of which, concerning certain literary critics and book sections, will have to go unprinted.

He is particularly emphatic on the ongoing row at the Royal Society of Literature, of which he is a member, regarding its decision – recently endorsed by its president, Bernardine Evaristo – to remain “impartial” over the stabbing of Salman Rushdie at an event in New York in 2022. The society has yet to condemn outright what happened, prompting Rushdie himself to ask, on social media, whether the RSL is “impartial” about attempted murder. “This is not a complicated issue,” Mukherjee says. “I don’t know what position of neutrality you can take when there has been an attempted murder for ideological reasons. The RSL absolutely should have put out a statement condemning the man who tried to kill him.”

Mukherjee grew up in relative poverty in Kolkata, where his parents made great sacrifices to send him and his brother to a Jesuit school. He was encouraged while at Jadavpur University to apply to Oxford, where he studied Renaissance literature; he has lived in Britain since arriving here in 1992. Yet for the last seven years he has spent four months a year teaching creative writing at Harvard, and says that teaching in America has given him a “new lease of life”.

“You have to constantly find arguments to make [about literature] to convince people who view the world entirely differently,” he says. “This generation is supremely confident. [But] they all want to write. None of them wants to read, they’re all about themselves. I was a gibbering baboon at their age, but at least I’d read some books.”

When it come to issues such as climate change, social justice and trans rights, he is, he says, “on their side in the war”. Yet he is aware, too, of a generational chasm. “I often think they don’t understand that what they are clamouring for is a new conservatism. There is a puritanical revolution going on.” He has found himself defending JK Rowling to students upset by her gender-critical beliefs. “The word ‘feminism’ doesn’t mean anything to them. My great worry is that they don’t know the history. They don’t understand that gender-critical feminism grew up out of a certain social-historical context.”

America, he says, has greatly “sensitised” him to the subject of race. “When I first moved to the UK, I used to think, ‘Oh, I’m like everyone else.’ If I ever felt alienated, it was as a cultural foreigner, rather than a racial one. I now understand I don’t have the luxury to feel like that.” He deplores the timidity with which conversations about race tend to happen in Britain. “In America, everything is contested. They are like dogs, constantly at each other’s throats – and that can be a positive, because there are no repressive forces running under the surface. Here, the moment race comes up, people’s faces change. They know they are entering a dangerous zone, and they don’t want to be called a racist, so they go quiet.”

Does he think, then, that Britain could have produced a film such as American Fiction, the hit US satire based on the Percival Everett novel Erasure, which skewers a whitedominated publishing industry obsessed with stories about black suffering? “I haven’t seen it, although Ayush [in Choice] observes that the English have a tendency to jump on the American bandwagon when it comes to conversations about race. But I do think the contexts, histories, parsing, particularities of race in the two countries are very different.” He isn’t sure that he could have written Choice had he not worked in America. “We could be having all sorts of conversations about race in fiction [but instead it is limited to] the remit identity politics have set us – ie. the question of who is allowed to write about what. Lots of writers have had to go to America in order to be liberated into writing about minority culture.”

Next, Mukherjee is toying with the idea of writing a big campus novel. “It would be a long Franzentype project. But I’m not sure I have the stomach for it. The thing is, I’d want to put everyone I know in it. I’d lose all my friends overnight.”

‘This generation is confident, but when I was their age, at least I’d read some books’