Review of the book The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota

His new book, The spoiled heart, finds a timeless imprint in the hot metal of the moment. The story explores identity politics, that complex intersection of race, gender, and sexual orientation that, depending on your perspective, promotes fairness or sanctifies discrimination. This is the kind of treacherous novel that Philip Roth could have written and almost did with The Human Stain.

But I already regret this comparison. Although Sahota is as clear-eyed as Roth about the crosscurrents of tribalism that distort our lives, his tone is still plaintive. No matter how much he sympathizes with the characters' grievances, he never sweats with the kind of rage that fueled Roth.

At the center of The Spoiled Heart is an affable and respected manager named Nayan Olak. As the novel opens, he is putting forward his candidacy for the position of general secretary of Britain's largest trade union. The executive committee assured Nayan that after years of loyal service, the time had come: as an Anglo-Indian, he would be the first non-white general secretary. He is expected to lead the union into a glorious future for colorblind people. Of course, he will be an expert in the art of gracefully subsuming minority concerns into the self-interests of the majority. You'll win, no problem, says a colleague, because you know that most of the laid-off workers in this country are white. Even when he was a teenager, his white friends' parents praised him: You're like one of us. Sahota notes that this compliment always left Nayan with a confusing mix of pleasure and hurt, of being both co-opted and made to feel like a traitor. But now he knows he's right: unions must focus on the great struggle of all workers, not the particular concerns of various minority groups.

Surely there is an intelligent young woman named Megha Sharma who will contest against him in the elections. Although she is also of Indian descent, she stands in stark contrast to Nayan: her parents are wealthy, she did not work for decades in the union, and she is fluent in the strident dialects of critical theory and politics identity. She has no trouble questioning Nayan's assertion that the old model of solidarity trumps all gender and racial differences. But Nayan remains convinced that highlighting concerns raised by, for example, women of color will appear to divide rank-and-file members.

And besides, Nayan is a little bit of the position of general secretary. After all, decades ago his mother and only child died in a horrific fire. Shortly after this tragedy, his marriage was shattered by grief. Over the years, it has become glamorized by the nature of its losses, by the hypnotic allure of the bereaved parent. It seems shameful, but if necessary, Nayan does not hesitate to allude to the fire and his mourning to tip the scales in his favor.

This is the unstable moral foundation of the Spoiled Heart. Sahota sets up an admirable protagonist and then lets our sympathy coagulate in the fetid atmosphere of his ambition. A similar reassessment takes place around Megha, who emerges as a privileged snob, drunk on the slogans of DEI activism, but who gradually reveals herself to be just as passionate about helping ordinary workers. Both candidates feel abused by the others' tactics, creating perilous negotiating territory as the campaign becomes increasingly contentious.

Along the way, Sahota throws so many disparate pieces into this story that it's a miracle when they begin to coalesce like a box of gears and springs rolling down the stairs and coming to rest in the shape of a clock. The novel's timely political debate develops alongside a growing mystery about the old fire that destroyed the Nayan family. The stench of this potentially racist attack lingers in deliberations about race in the workplace. And as much as Nayan would like to deny it, race also influences how people talk about his romantic relationship with Helen Fletcher, a white woman who recently returned to town.

In fact, the only clunky element of The Spoiled Heart is a subplot involving Helen's teenage son, Brandon. He was once fired from a catering service job after a wealthy black student concocted a racist offense and lashed out at the woke mob. This melodrama of white innocence and manufactured racial protest seems like one of those reactionary narratives recycled on Fox News and in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal.

Or perhaps this anecdote is a crucial reminder that we receive these details second and third hand, after they have been picked up and transformed into stories that make sense to the different storytellers. As the narrator admits, I only knew a small part of these people, the part that could be held and beaten like metal into some sort of shape.

Because, you see, Le Cœur gâté is indeed a novel told to us by an interested spectator; it is a tragedy like Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby that has taken root in the mind of a haunted spectator. In this case, the narrator is Sajjan Dhanoa, who remembers Nayan as an older and much cooler student of the time. After high school, Sajjan moved to London and became a successful fiction writer. But The Spoiled Heart is not one of his novels; rather, they are bundled notes, interviews, and scraps of speculation that he pieced together as he searched for a new plot. “I had no idea for a while,” he admits. Surely there was some material here.

During their first reunion, Nayan accuses him of building a career out of making us look despicable. But that's not fair. Throughout The Spoiled Heart, Sajjan struggles to guess what happened to his former acquaintance. It pushes neighbors and relatives to remember a dark past. I didn't intend to spy, he says, but every time his thumb slides into the camera's field of view, I'm reminded of the voyeuristic setting of this project. When Nayan's memories seem hopelessly self-aggrandizing, Sajjan confesses: “Like Nayan, I wanted to believe that this could be true, and when someone asks him: Is this something you are writing for publication?” he squirms: Just for me, really. This all gets pretty personal. He's more right than he thinks, and he draws us into the same conspiracy to create a coherent narrative, to explain the painful descent of this once-successful man.

I was still just trying to connect, Sajjan tells us as the novel accelerates toward a series of increasingly shocking revelations. But what can or should we really know? This is the paradox with which this brilliant novel struggles and which will consume any reader who picks it up.

Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Reading Club Washington Post newsletter. He is a book critic for CBS Sunday Morning.