THE SPOILED HEART, by Sunjeev Sahota
The titular spoiled heart of Sunjeev Sahota’s new novel is not spoiled in the sense of being overindulged. It is spoiled in the sense of being ruptured, through hardship. A tragedy in which a man comes to personal and profession ruin, the novel explores whether the ruination is self-inflicted or societal, and whether it is a degenerative condition or if some radical surgery can reverse it. Certainly, Sahota has a surgeon’s dexterous hands, and the reader senses his confidence.
Sahota’s fourth novel is his first to be set entirely in England. His debut, “Ours Are the Streets,” portrays the radicalization of a young boy in Sheffield and his life-changing return to his home in Pakistan. “The Year of the Runaways,” a Booker Prize finalist, follows three housemates in Sheffield and the interconnected tales of their migration from India. “China Room” counterposes the story of a young bride in 1929 rural Punjab with that of a second-generation immigrant battling addiction in 1999. Gender inequality, cultural alienation and generational trauma are some of Sahota’s favored themes, and they carry over into “The Spoiled Heart.”
The protagonist is a 42-year-old factory manager in Chesterfield named Nayan Olak, who is hoping to advance his career by running for general secretary of Britain’s biggest union. The caregiver to his abusive father, Nayan grieves for his mother and son, who died in a fire in the family home and shop some 20 years prior. His marriage didn’t survive the tragedy, and now, in the fall of 2017, he is finally pursuing a love interest: Helen Fletcher, newly returned to her hometown with her son.
Helen is a home health aide, so when she turns down an offer to care for Nayan’s father, we sense a conspicuous withholding of information. She and her teenage son, Brandon, have had to relocate from London after a public furor over remarks Brandon made at his job that were deemed racist — a story that Helen doesn’t disclose until it finds a horrible parallel in Nayan’s life.
Withheld revelations and dark secrets drive the novel’s family saga and romantic strands. But the story’s engine lies in the union leadership contest between Nayan, who is running on a class-struggle platform, and Megha Sharma, a self-described change candidate fighting for racial equality. They’re both of Indian descent, though Megha hails from a wealthy family while Nayan had a far less privileged upbringing.
The campaign escalates to a heated town-hall debate comprising the last act of the novel, in which the left eats itself by pitting identity politics against class solidarity. (Sahota himself has said in an interview that Prime Minister “Rishi Sunak is not my racial friend, he is my class enemy.” This might have been Nayan’s line if the novel were set a few years later, after Sunak’s rise to power, also as a professed change candidate.) Ultimately, the politics become personal, and the descending arc of Nayan’s life steepens.
This is a plot-packed, propulsive story even without the withheld revelations that will have some readers wanting to shrug off the steering hand on their backs. Sahota employs an initially distracting framing device of an external narrator — a novelist-cum-journalist who is interviewing Nayan about his past. Inevitably, this character discovers that he is not a neutral actor in Nayan’s history.
The question persists as to whether a person should ever be wholly forgiven for past mistakes, particularly when they never fully admit the mistakes to themselves. With scandal plaguing a major Conservative Party donor in Britain who reportedly made racist comments, and Sunak continuing to accept such donations while wagging a finger, this novel is as topical as they come.
There is an easeful precision to Sahota’s prose reminiscent of Kamila Shamsie and Jhumpa Lahiri, a painful irony that evokes Percival Everett, and a grand human downfall alongside a battle of ideas that is Ibsenesque. Just as climate activists recently interrupted Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” on Broadway, past activists haunt this book with the warning that to obscure history is to fail to learn from it, and that to divide is to be conquered.
THE SPOILED HEART | By Sunjeev Sahota | Viking | 329 pp. | $29
