Talk Diversity to Me

After Olivia Robinson hijacks the keynote presentation at a company conference to share her colleague Osman Shah’s story of a past “tangle” with airport security, she asks the room of upper managers, “Are we really valuing diversity? Are we channelling the fullness of the experience of our Osmans?” The hapless narrator of Naben Ruthnum’s acerbic novel, A Hero of Our Time, has been played at his own game. The power of Osman’s ordeal — which he used to recount as “more of a joke”— has been subsumed into someone else’s narrative. “I see your faces now in this crowd as I admit I never have before,” Olivia says, in a speech that fast-tracks her to the top of the corporate ladder.

Olivia’s leadership “coup” is hidden in an apology, in her acknowledgment of her own cultural naïveté about inclusion at AAP, a company whose name Ruthnum never feels the need to spell out. But her co-workers are, to some extent, in on the ruse of this “enlightenment” tale. They accept...