Review | ‘The Spoiled Heart’ will consume any reader who picks it up (2024)

His new book, “The Spoiled Heart,” finds a timeless imprint in the hot metal of the moment. The story explores identity politics, that complicated intersection of race, gender and sexual orientation that, depending on your point of view, promotes equity or sanctifies discrimination. It’s the kind of treacherous novel that Philip Roth might have written — and almost did with “The Human Stain.”

But I already regret that comparison. Although Sahota is just as clear-eyed as Roth about the crosscurrents of tribalism that contort our lives, his tone is always plaintive. No matter how deeply he sympathizes with characters’ grievances, he never sweats with the kind of rage that fueled Roth.

At the center of “The Spoiled Heart” is an affable, well-respected manager named Nayan Olak. When the novel opens, he puts up his name for general secretary of Britain’s largest labor union. The executive committee has assured Nayan that after years of loyal service, the time is right: As an Anglo-Indian, he’ll be the first non-White general secretary. He’s expected to lead the union into a glorious colorblind future. Of course he will — he’s an expert at graciously subsuming minorities’ concerns within the majority’s self-interest. “You’ll win, no probs,” a colleague says, because “you know that most of the workers being failed in this country are white.” Even as a teenager, his White friend’s parents used to congratulate him: “You’re just like one of us.” Sahota notes that this compliment always left Nayan with a “confusing blend of pleasure and injury, of being both co-opted and made to feel traitorous.” But now he knows he’s right: The union’s focus must be on the great struggle of all working folks, not the particular concerns of various minority groups.

Running against him in the election — a long shot, surely — is a smart young woman named Megha Sharma. Though she’s also of Indian descent, she draws a stark contrast with Nayan: Her parents are wealthy, she hasn’t put in decades of work on the union, and she’s fluent in the strident dialects of critical theory and identity politics. She has no trouble poking holes in Nayan’s contention that the old model of solidarity supersedes all gender and racial differences. But Nayan remains convinced that highlighting concerns raised by, say, women of color will strike rank and file members as divisive.

And besides, Nayan is kinda-sorta owed the position of general secretary. After all, decades ago, his mother and only child died in a horrible fire. Soon after that tragedy, his marriage was snuffed out by grief. Over the years, he has been “made glamorous by the nature of his losses, by the hypnotic allure of the bereaved parent.” It feels shameful, but in a pinch, Nayan isn’t above alluding to the fire and his bereavement “to tilt things in his favour.”

Such is the unstable moral foundation of “The Spoiled Heart.” Sahota draws up an admirable protagonist and then lets our sympathy curdle in the fetid atmosphere of his ambition. A similar reassessment takes place around Megha, who comes across as a privileged snob, drunk on the slogans of DEI activism, but then gradually proves herself just as passionate about helping ordinary workers. Both candidates feel abused by the other’s tactics, which creates a perilous terrain for us to negotiate as the campaign becomes increasingly contentious.

Along the way, Sahota throws so many disparate parts into this story that it’s something of a miracle when they begin to coalesce — like a box of gears and springs tumbling down the stairs and coming to rest in the shape of a clock. The novel’s timely political debate develops alongside a swelling mystery about the old fire that destroyed Nayan’s family. The scent of that possibly racist attack lingers over deliberations about race in the workplace. And as much as Nayan would like to deny it, race also informs the way people gossip about his romantic relationship with Helen Fletcher, a White woman who recently moved back to town.

In fact, the only ham-handed element in “The Spoiled Heart” is a subplot involving Helen’s teenage son, Brandon. He was once fired from a dining services job after a wealthy Black student concocted a racist offense and sicced the woke mob on him. This melodrama of White innocence and manufactured racial protest feels like one of those reactionary yarns recycled on Fox News and the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal.

Or maybe that anecdote is a crucial reminder that we’re receiving these details second- and third-hand, after they’ve been picked over and processed into stories that make sense to the various tellers. As the narrator admits, “I knew only a small part … of any of these people, the part that could be held and beaten like metal into some kind of form.”

Because, you see, “The Spoiled Heart” is very much a novel told to us by an interested spectator; it’s a tragedy like Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” that has taken root in the mind of a haunted onlooker. In this case, the narrator is Sajjan Dhanoa, who remembers Nayan as an older, much cooler student from back in the day. After high school, Sajjan moved to London and became a successful fiction writer. But “The Spoiled Heart” isn’t one of his novels; instead, it’s the clustered notes, interviews and scraps of speculation he collected when he was casting about for a new plot. “I’d been without an idea for a while,” he confesses. “Surely there was material here.”

At their first reunion, Nayan accuses him of “building a career out of making us look contemptible.” But that’s not fair. Throughout “The Spoiled Heart,” Sajjan struggles to divine what happened to his old acquaintance. He pushes neighbors and relatives to remember dark pasts. “I wasn’t intending to spy,” he claims, but every time his thumb slips into the camera view, we’re reminded of the voyeuristic frame of this project. When Nayan’s memories sound hopelessly self-aggrandizing, Sajjan confesses, “Like Nayan, I wanted to believe that it might be true,” and when someone asks him, “Is this something you’re writing for publication?” he squirms: “Just for me, really. It’s all become quite personal.” He’s more right than he knows, and he lures us into the same conspiracy to create a coherent tale, to explain the harrowing descent of this once-successful man.

“I was always just trying to connect,” Sajjan tells us — pleads with us — as the novel accelerates toward a series of increasingly shocking revelations. But how much can really ever be known or should be? That’s the paradox this brilliant novel wrestles with and one that will consume any reader who picks it up.

Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post. He is the book critic for “CBS Sunday Morning.”

By Sunjeev Sahota

Viking. 329 pp. $29