Sameer Pandya is a fiction writer and an interdisciplinary literary and cultural studies scholar. In both his fiction and scholarship, Pandya is primarily interested in the question of cultural dislocation and racial identity among South Asian Americans.
His novel Members Only, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2020, was named an NPR Best Books of 2020 and was a finalist for the 90th Annual California Book Award in Fiction. See the review of the novel in the New York Times and listen to interviews on NPR’s Morning Edition with Steve Inskeep, Texas Public Radio, and WBUR Chicago.
Our Beautiful Boys revolves around three families in the city of Chileworth in well-to-do Southern California, as the lives of two high school football team captains and a rookie player are interwoven and changed forever in “that darkness [that] would pull four boys into the largest cave, their arms and legs soon flailing and tangled, the click-click of their bones against bone, their grunts and cries echoing off the smooth walls.” Much as the Indians in the 1980’s are scandalized by McDonald’s use of lard in their fries, the Indian-American, Hispanic-American and white-American families have their clear version of the American dream fried in “bad oil.”
Tiffany Troy: The title Our Beautiful Boys centers the perspectives of the parents of the novel, and raises interesting themes/ motifs surrounding “beauty.” How does the title form a doorway into the novel?
Sameer Pandya: When I first sold the novel, it was called The Boys. And then, for a bit, it became Our Boys. Finally, I found the right title–the right doorway as you say–with the addition of the word “beautiful.” I was interested in using the word to describe a set of boys who do plenty that is not beautiful. Any mention of beauty and the beautiful points to that which isn’t. And yet, each of the three sets of parents continue to believe, want to believe, that their son could not have been the one that did anything wrong. The movement from adolescence to adulthood, which this novel is partly marking, is the necessary loss of beauty. And in that context, and from the perspectives of the parents, the title is melancholy. A type of longing for the past, for a childhood, which cannot be recovered. The novel poses the question of what role the parents themselves play in this loss.
TT: This is your second novel, after Members Only. What was the process in the plotting and writing of this novel and how is it similar or different from your debut novel, both in terms of others’ expectations of you as a writer, and your own goals and aspirations for yourself?
SP: Members Only is written in the first person. This new novel is in third person, moving between multiple points of view. In terms of craft, this was the biggest difference from novel #1 to novel #2. I make liberal use of a large cork board in my office where I map out my books. With Our Beautiful Boys, I used a lot more of the space on that board. In moving from one point of view to the next, I had to figure out how to keep the plot moving forward. In terms of my aspirations here, I have always been interested in families and domesticity. And so, instead of concentrating on one family like I did in Members Only, I moved to three families. The idea was to show how they–the Shastris, the Cruzes, the Berringers–are all different, but then also quite similar in terms of their aspirations for their children. Of course, I was nervous about moving between points of view. But in a novel that is about echoes and different versions of the truth, the multiple POVs were necessary.
I want to also answer your question about expectations of me as a writer. In Members Only and in The Blind Writer, my first book of stories, I have written from the point of view of Indian Americans. That has shaped my own expectations as a writer and perhaps the expectations of my readers. With this new book, I didn’t set out to expand my purview for the sake of expanding it. I was interested in families and boys and race and masculinity. And in this, it felt organic to have an Indian American family, but then also a white and Latino family.
TT: In crafting characters like Gita or Michael or the boys in third person with dialogue, how much research did you have to do? Or was it mostly already inside of you, from your experience and imagination.
SP: In this particular case, I did very little direct research in terms of fleshing out these various characters. I know plenty of Gitas and Michaels and the various boys. I am Gita and Michael and the various boys. This helped me work through their interior lives–their desires, their disappointments. But at the same time, I wanted to get certain things right. I want my readers to feel like they can trust me with details. And this is where research does come in. Before she had children, Gita worked as a management consultant. I had some sense of that work life, but I needed to fill in some particulars. Michael runs a financial investment firm; I wanted to know about his clients and what is the average percentage of returns he gets them. In his very nice living room, there is a painting by a Dutch Master. I made up the artist, but I needed to make sure that the artist could have plausibly existed in art history. I spend a lot of time with teenage boys–in the form of my children and their friends. I listened to them a lot–the way they talk, the ways that they are joyful and fearful. All of this took research. Perhaps not in the traditional way we understand the term. Deep noticing and deep listening is its own form of research.
TT: In writing about place, specifically the fictional construct of the setting of Our Beautiful Boys that share resonances with the real place, and the mythical cave, who are some writers that you look towards?
SP: First and foremost in terms of place, I looked to E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, which is a bit strange given that the southern California of my novel could not be further from the India Forster creates. But the mystery of his Marabar Caves and the question that he poses about them–what happened in the caves?–has stayed with me in the nearly thirty years that have passed since I first read the novel. I moved his fictional Chandrapore to my fictional Chilesworth and went from there. It’s been nearly as long since I read Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust, but his sense of California as bright sunshine and darkness made an impression. At the same time, I think music has been equally important in my understanding of California as a place. The first album I bought in America, with my own hard earned money, was “The Long Run” by the Eagles. It sounds like a Califoirnia noir album to me. The epigraph for this novel is by Forster. But if I had to add another one, it would be from the folk singer Kate Wolf: “Here in California fruit hangs heavy on the vines, But there’s no gold, I thought I’d warn you, And the hills turn brown in the summertime.”
TT: The novel tackles desire head on through the game of American football viewed through the lens of high-achieving high school students who had all they ever needed, in some senses. Could you tell us next how the structure of the novel helps with the unfolding of the story or stories as they are told?
SP: As a writer, I have always been interested in time and temporality as a way of structuring a novel. How to tell stories in short and long spurts of time? What does it allow me to do in terms of plot and character development? Our Beautiful Boys is broken down into three parts. Part I takes place over two weeks as I introduce all the characters and their various conflicts. As the reader becomes familiar with the characters, I dig deeper into them by slowing down narrative time. Part II–the longest section of the book–takes place over one week. Monday morning to Friday night. I love the week as novelistic time. There are plenty of novels that narrate a day or a hundred years. Not so many that use the week or the month as the unit of time. Part III takes place in two short spurts. Most of it takes place over 24 hours. And the final chapter is essentially a fifteen minute conversation between two of the characters, some weeks after that 24 hours. And then we end with a photograph, nearly eighty years old, that takes us back in time and moves us forward in time, to the future lives of these characters.
TT: Do you have any advice for aspiring novelists who want to find their own “voice” or “style”?
SP: I have always been intrigued by this question of voice. What does it mean to find one’s voice or style? Does it already exist, hidden somewhere in our creative consciousness, waiting to be unearthed? Or is it constructed over time, as one whittles away aspects of their style that works and doesn’t work. I suspect it is a combination of both. When I think of voice, I think of one’s way of looking at the world. What do you notice over and over again? Are you interested in interiority? Does your eye fall to the external factors that shape a character? Do you like humor? But then, as you keep writing, you tend to add to your style and voice. You read writers you love, you find new writers to admire. You start working on dialogue in a different way. You are a maximalist and this time around, you want to relax a bit and say less. In all this, style and voice are ever changing. And I think as a writer, you wouldn’t want it any other way. And so for writers who are trying to find style and voice, know that it is an iterative process. And also know that the voice that scares you a bit, that makes you nervous, is the voice trying to say something. Listen to it.
TT: In closing, do you have any thoughts for your readers of the world?
SP: When I set out to write novels, I didn’t think of myself as a plotty novelist. But now, two novels in, I realize that I really like the machinations of plot. I like working through, to borrow from Flannery O’Connor, how character shapes action and how action shapes character. As a reader, I want you to turn from one page to the next. And yet, at the same time, I want you to of course think about the ideas that are tucked into the story. And so, dear reader, read for, in the case of this new novel, what happened in the cave. But stick around to think about caves and echoes and the slipperiness of truth.