In the spring of 2016, while working on my doctorate, I was a teaching assistant for Sameer Pandya’s ASAM 4, Asian American Popular Culture, at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The class was revelatory. Through a combination of literature, film, and music, the instructor showed that even the concept of Asian America was often limited in its explication.
Asian America was more than just the identity of Americans of Asian descent; it was how American pop culture influenced Asian identities globally. From Rudyard Kipling and Ambrose Bierce to Jane Iwamura, Haruki Murakami, and Pawan Dhingra, the teaching assistants and students embarked on a journey about voice and the voiceless.
The premise of Sameer Pandya’s most recent book, Our Beautiful Boys, is clever: what if one of M.K. Gandhi’s descendants pushed against the family narrative of ahimsa (Sanskrit – nonviolence) for a chance to play football, decidedly himsa (violence)? So begins the narrative of the Shastris, one of three families who form the story’s core.
The Berringers and single mom Veronica Cruz join them. Each son from these families is a typical teen with tensions around parental gatekeeping, white-passing, and generational wealth. This sets the scene for the complicated dance the families will play with each other.
Vikram, Diego, and MJ – Indian, Latino, and White, respectively – decide to attend a typical high school party, and the consequences of that night will shape all three young men and their families. While moments of Our Beautiful Boys feel like a whodunit, the story works because it defies genre. It is a combination of mystery, coming of age, identity, and choices, but not in a way that feels like the author is trying too hard.
A lot has happened in a decade since I reviewed Sameer Pandya’s 2015 collection of short stories, The Blind Writer. Yet, Indian identity is still a component of Our Beautiful Boys. Pandya has a gift for capturing dialogue among different populations: teens, professors, couples, families, and even football players. He writes not as an outsider overhearing the most intimate moments but as an insider with a beautiful approach to writing from a place of knowing. The dissolution of marriages, adolescent uncertainty, intergenerational feudalism, tenure-track politics, workplace drama, and school toxicity are all tackled creatively here.
Indeed, so much of the material in Our Beautiful Boys feels familiar but not clichéd. For example, the Cave House, where the pivotal event occurs, is one of many abandoned properties common in coastal California. It reminded me of a combination between Santa Barbara’s Bellosguardo and San Simeon’s Hearst Castle. I know the Bay Area well, so the idea of a “pure” vegetarian Indian restaurant around Berkeley/El Cerrito felt like home.
While Sameer Pandya’s lived experiences as a humanities professor deeply influence this book – what speaker hasn’t experienced insane audience questions and tenure-track drama? – Our Beautiful Boys handles two issues exceedingly well: married life and racial politics. I winced at how these characters talk to each other as coldly as Mary Tyler Moore’s Beth Jarrett in Robert Redford’s majestic 1980 drama, Ordinary People. Reading Our Beautiful Boys is like watching Pandya’s stage direction of a play about marital disintegration, particularly in the direct and indirect ways that couples consider intimacy or “the semiannual tiptoeing into sex”. Feckless men and resentful women make for some pretty damaged relationships.
On a recent episode of Desi podcast OK, Mom, the hosts read an email from a husband whose marriage had gotten so bad that he didn’t even smile in front of his wife anymore. He believed doing so would mean he somehow enjoyed parenting, which would minimize his wife’s difficulties. This reminded me of Gita’s inner monologues, masterfully captured by Pandya: “It had been her who’d rebuffed Gautam’s desire to be intimate at night, making vague reference to perimenopause, when in reality she didn’t like the sound of Gautam’s voice so close to her ear or the weight of him. But she still felt a pang.”
At its most vulnerable places, Our Beautiful Boys takes on the complexity of privilege, racial passing, stereotypes, discrimination, hierarchies, and the model minority. Sameer Pandya goes where few writers do, mining the pain experienced by parents who may have lived their whole lives in the US but still wrestle with figuring out America’s existential crises. The decision to play high school football is a normal conversation in much of the country, but not for the Shastris who call it “the new white flight sport. Lacrosse is over. Colleges assume you’re a rapist in training.”
Troubles escalate when MJ, Diego, and Vikram are accused of a crime, and the many conversations between students, parents, and the principal descend into chaos and a master class in gaslighting. When Gita, perhaps the most important character in Our Beautiful Boys, mutters, “This is not something my son could have done … We’re not that type of family,” Pandya writes the scene perfectly. “Even Gita knew, as the words were coming out of her mouth, that she’d just removed the pin from a small grenade.”
Many cultural wars are happening concurrently in the United States, but the question of racial privilege may be at the top. As the Trump administration actively dismantles DEI programming and race-related collegiate policies, there has never been a more important time for a writer to tackle the everyday realities of racial reckoning. Sameer Pandya has taken on this dirty work in Our Beautiful Boys.