Book Review | ‘Our Beautiful Boys’ by Sameer Pandya

Family and Violence Take the Field in New Novel

It’s no coincidence that the two main subjects of Sameer Pandya’s second novel Our Beautiful Boys are family and violence. Set in a vaguely Santa Barbara–ish fictional Chilesworth, CA (Pandya is an associate professor of Asian American Studies at UCSB), the book focuses on three high school football players and a vicious attack of a fourth student at a post-game party in a spot called the Cave House. This sly and captivating book fronts as a whodunit — crucial plot elements keep dropping until the very final pages — but even more so it’s a whoarewe, if I may create a sub-genre, as all its well-limned characters must confront the chaos of their inner selves. And then try to find where their true selves allow them to be in the shifting and complex milieus of family, work, teams, friendships.

Pandya masterfully builds three distinct family units — the Shastris, Gita and Gautum, and their golf-playing son Vikram, suddenly turning his attention to football; the Cruzes, high-powered academic Veronica, her running back son Diego, and her brother, Alex; and the generationally privileged Berringers, Shirley, Michael, and their star quarterback son Michael Jr., who goes by MJ. Issues of race and class are clearly obvious from the first pigheaded teen-boy taunt, but they go lots deeper than mere name-calling. Indeed, issues of race will grow quite twisted as Veronica’s backstory unspools, and we get to discover why she might be so hesitant to visit her parents. In this way Pandya gets to examine what the limits of self-invention are.

But there’s little moralizing, at least from the omniscient narrator’s perspective. Characters, however, have no problem leveling attacks at each other, especially when the parents go into child-protection mode. It’s like Randy Newman’s song “My Life Is Good,” when Newman tells off the teacher who tries to say his son is a “big old thing” ruffian. Yet, all the kids are our beautiful boys.

Not that sport doesn’t suggest otherwise. The Gandhi-loving Vikram finds a sheer thrill the first time he plows over a defender — it makes him feel “primal and naughty and dangerous and terrible.” Veronica, whose academic work centers on histories of the colonial Brazil slave trade, feels “a genuine elation, an elation unmatched by any other moment in her life,” watching Diego break into daylight on a touchdown run. By the book’s end, the simplicity of ending an argument with violence — which in the academic’s case, of course, is stingingly accusing an undergrad of “Marxsplaining” in front of a crowd — even wells up in the parents, even after what their children have done. Or perhaps that’s maybe because.

Our Beautiful Boys is not into easy answers — sure, people are bullied and teased and try to survive with a slow level of terror in their everyday lives. And that’s not just at Chilesworth High, for Gautum suffers as a salesman in a way close to Willy Loman, and Michael Sr. is still losing power struggles with his hard-love, aging dad. Nothing in the book ever lines up as a simple trigger/action. It’s always more complicated than that.

Also more funny. Pandya’s debut novel Members Only, a satire of an Indian-American academic who gets accused of racism at his tennis club and of bigoted anti-racism at his university, certainly laid the groundwork for this more complex work. Here Pandya still can zing bougie life; at one point Veronica watches Michael pick limes very deliberately for gimlets and thinks, “Yes, yes, we know you grew the fucking limes yourself.” Or, during an awkward meeting at a farmers’ market, describe a colleague looking “at Veronica this time as if she had caught her in an affair, or perhaps worse, overspending on chanterelles.”

Beyond the attuned cultural criticism, Pandya also has great insight for the mechanics, struggles, and mirages of marriage. After Shirley shows up at Michael’s shell of an office — and thereby discovering that his financial services business is in ruins — with expensive bluefin for a dinner party, we get this passage:

“Are we really arguing about tuna?” Shirley asked.

“We don’t have to be. You could have brought salmon filets like everyone else.”

“Salmon is an inelegant fish; the texture is all wrong.”

You know you aren’t arguing just about tuna when your partner stops to drop a semicolon in one of her replies. How often a life with someone is talking one thing, saying another. Letting silence build into something more like a secret. Wondering when you can touch, for how long, and not be rebuffed. Wishing it all could be steamrolled, roundhoused, pummeled into submission.

When the high school’s principal, desperately trying to get to the bottom of things, offers, “The more I’ve thought about it, the more I realize that this situation is much bigger than who did what,” she’s not just talking about our beautiful boys; she’s talking about Our Beautiful Boys. And the rest of us, too.

This review originally appeared in the California Review of Books. Read the Santa Barbara Independent interview with author Sameer Pandya here.