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.