A Passage to Novelist

An Exploration of Masculinity, Race,
Class, Violence, Families, and Football Flavor
Sameer Pandya’s Our Beautiful Boys

By Leslie Dinaberg | March 20, 2025

Sports are an incredible metaphorical playing field to reflect on everything from violence and masculinity to race, education, the divisions of privilege and class, and the bonds between teammates, and parents and their children — all topics explored in Our Beautiful Boys, the powerful new novel by Sameer Pandya. 

An associate professor of Asian American Studies at UCSB, Pandya’s debut novel, Members Only, was written in the first person and took place in the course of a week in the life of a South Asian college professor whose fellow members of a posh tennis club accuse him of racism. With Our Beautiful Boys, Pandya widens his storytelling to include multiple, diverse points of view revolving around the story of three high school football players, their families, and a moment of violence that will drastically change all of their lives.

In choosing the main families, “I don’t think I necessarily sat down and thought, ‘Okay, I need three families, right? Or that I need an Indian-American family, the Shastris. I need a kind of a Latino family, the Cruzes. And I need a white American family, the Berringers.’ But rather there were these characters that struck me, right, and these characters doing certain things, things that kind of popped up,” said Pandya.

“I have this kind of deep, abiding interest in family life, in domesticity, in marriage, in the ways in which parents can relate to their children, the ways in which children have these changing relationships with their parents. So, all of these things are, I think, important to me. There are, of course, differences between these families. That they are what we know, whatever we might call cultural differences that exist there in really interesting ways. But what I tried to do in the book was this idea that if I dug deep enough with each of these families, they would be all drinking out of the same water, right? … The idea is that I’m trying to think through what a contemporary American family looks like. And instead of creating a singular family, I wanted these three families who have differences.”

He continued, “I think the work of this novel for me was just to inhabit these three families right, and to stick these three teenage boys at the center of them, and how each of these sets of parents behave as the stories unfold. Veronica is, of course, is single, and then you have these two sets of parents with the other families, how they deal with these boys, and particularly boys in the contemporary moment where we find ourselves in right now, who are trying to figure themselves out in relationship to their notions of masculinity and notions of kind of what it means to be successful, to go off to college. So that is the broader sense of why these families have been so important to me in the book.”

As to where the football team setting came from, Pandya is a sports fan and said his older son played football for a very brief time. “It was just kind of in my consciousness, kind of thinking about all of this. In some ways that there’s a kind of a line that I think the narrator has, which is, ‘Is there a more un-Gandhian sport than American football?’” 

Notably, a family connection to Gandhi does factor into one of the characters in the novel.

Added Pandya, “And so I think that I was trying to think through in a novel … where there are these kinds of smaller moments of violence, and these young men have to choose where to go in relation to them.”

The violence in the story takes place not on the field but at a party at an abandoned house in the Southern California foothills, located right below three ancient caves. 

The caves were inspired by Santa Barbara.

“This all started because I kind of stared at foothills from my backyard, and at one point I noticed what looked like these tiny holes or caves in one of the hills. And I was like, ‘Huh, what’s going on in that cave? Who’s in that cave? Are there boys in that cave?’ … It all just started with a curiosity about this cave, and I went from there,” said Pandya. He was also inspired by A Passage to India, the classic 1924 novel by EM Forster, much of which takes place in a cave.

Friday Night Lights, both the novel and the TV series, were points of reference and reverence for him — and, in a fun parallel in Our Beautiful Boys, the Shastris watch Friday Night Lights in order to learn about American football. 

“Football serves, I think, as a really interesting parallel, right, which is an occasion where there are these rules that are placed around violence, right? You can do this and you can do that, right? And I think in a certain way, football kind of came to be a perfect metaphor for what I was trying to think through around notions of the ways in which the boys of the title, kind of the rules they learn about the kind of violence they can engage in and the violence that they’re not supposed to engage in,” said Pandya.

Another novel, the 1959 classic A Separate Peace by John Knowles, also provided some of the inspiration for Our Beautiful Boys. “Part of what this book is trying to do is to think through peace and violence, and kind of what the relationship is between those two things,” said Pandya. 

As to the connection between his scholarly work and his fiction, “so much of the ideas that are central to this book are ideas that I think about in my classroom, that I talk about with my colleagues,” said Pandya.

One of the characters, Veronica Cruz, shares some of Pandya’s own academic interests. He said he took particular delight in picking out the books that would be on Veronica’s shelf. 

“I work at a great research institution where I’m going to talks, where I’m going to conferences and all of these different things. And so, a very different conversation that you and I can have is all the ways in which broad ideas around literary criticism and Asian American studies all kind of make their way into this book, right? And I think I could, very, very easily, kind of think about what notions of gender and race and privilege and class and performativity, all these words and phrases that I use in class, in some ways, I give it to these characters,” he said.

“And what was particularly fun for me is to think about these teenage boys that have also been taught some of this academic language in their classes, and how they react to it. There’s a thing with teenagers, where if you tell them what to think, they will think the opposite, right? And I think that that’s what I’m also just trying to figure out, which is, how do these characters kind of deal with these things and kind of talk about them?” he said.

“At its most core level, I want to be told stories, and I want to tell stories,” said Pandya. “In an ideal situation, you read this book as you read Members Only [his first novel], as a story that moves from page one to page, you know, whatever, 300-plus pages, right? And that there’s a level of entertainment, there’s a level of interest, there’s a level of intrigue, right, but at the same time, if you are this kind of reader, you can also then go back and perhaps recognize that there’s all sorts of other stuff that I love playing with.”

He continued, “I think, in some ways, this book is my kind of love letter to the books that have been profoundly important to me.”

Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s Parallel Stories literary and performing arts series will host the launch of Sameer Pandya’s second novel, Our Beautiful Boys, on Saturday, March 22, 2:30 p.m., at SBMA’s Mary Craig Auditorium (1130 State St.). He will read from the novel and discuss his cultural and personal influences. Books will be for sale by Chaucer’s Books at the event, which is free for students and SBMA Museum Circle members, $10 for SBMA members, and $15 for nonmembers. See tickets.sbma.net. 

In addition, on Thursday, April 17, at 6 p.m., Godmother’s Books (2280 Lillie Ave., Summerland) will host an evening with Sameer Pandya in conversation with actress Megyn Price about Our Beautiful Boys. For more information, see godmothers.com/events.