Mukherjee is brilliant at tracing the ways a choice deferred becomes a fate sealed. But the book’s tripartite structure is even better at showing how we graze one another’s lives with our decisions, some of which may be catastrophic for our conscience but beneficial for our art ... A lesser writer would offer only pathos. Mukherjee is alive to all that — but also to the rich, cruel comedy of being saddled with an asset you can’t digest, a gift that costs you everything, a choice you can’t unmake.
Mukherjee sacrifices the readerly satisfaction that comes from dramatic payoffs; instead of providing pure narrative, he creates a dialectic ... Mukherjee pulls the reader into these problems with a seriousness and technical excellence that makes a lot of what is published today seem immature. Choice asks much of us readers. But, for all its pessimism, it trusts us to be up to it.
Can be read as a novel or as three stand-alone stories. The third part, though refreshingly different, proves the least involving. The first part, by far the strongest, is marred only by the scant insight it offers into publishing ... Otherwise, Mukherjee impresses. He captivates readers but also stimulates them by rigorously exploring race, agency, equality, the weight of our moral quandaries and the implications of our choices.
Formally daring ... Represents another order of self-referential metafiction. It succeeds, though, because it’s never without fiction’s traditional pleasures, from the close social observation of rural Bengal to delicate evocations of London.
The three parts, then, operate simultaneously as discrete, fictionally self-sufficient if subtly intertextual, episodes and as a nest of embedded narratives, the second and third parts at a double remove from the reader, fictions created by fictional characters we have met in the first part. Where this approach begins to creak a bit is in the manner of the stories’ telling ... The inescapability of the large economic forces determining their fate, powerfully conveyed as it is, feathers the brake on its narrative momentum.
Ayush isn’t the first fictional character to obsess about irreversible environmental damage; where Mukherjee succeeds is in rendering his agony, his insomnia, as absorbingly believable ... Choice is undone by its third section ... The story is set sometime in the past decade, but Mukherjee reproduces stereotypes of rural poverty... dating back to colonial-era Bengal.
Both more ambitious and less successful, harmed by the fact that its second and third sections just cannot compete with its blistering first ... Mukherjee imbues these sections with a propulsive mix of anger and grace, but neither is especially complicated.
These pages abound with misery: animal mistreatment, the harsh plight of refugees, and dire poverty. But the rewards—indelible images, admirable story-telling, and wicked good writing--are many.
sets into motion a series of events that leaves the family in ruin. Rote ruminations about the shortcomings of contemporary publishing and academia bog things down, and while Mukherjee exhaustively explores the gray areas inhabited by his characters, the three narratives don’t quite hang together. This doesn’t reach the heights of the author’s previous work.
