UC Santa Barbara Author Sameer Pandya Examines The Price Of Belonging
India-West Staff Reporter
Our Beautiful Boys, by Sameer Pandya, Ballantine
Author Sameer Pandya crafts a gripping literary thriller set against the complexities of Indian American identity, privilege, and belonging. The novel opens with a haunting scene: four teenagers venture into a cave in Southern California, their camaraderie teetering between bravado and rivalry. When only three reemerge unscathed, the story spirals into an exploration of secrets, social hierarchies, and the fraught nature of identity.
Pandya, an associate professor at UC Santa Barbara, draws inspiration from E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, where an ambiguous cave incident fuels questions of truth and perception. He transposes that thematic uncertainty to contemporary America, weaving in issues of race, privilege, and the nuances of assimilation.
At the heart of the novel is Vikram, a teenager navigating the dual expectations of his Indian American upbringing and the hyper-masculine world of high school football. His family reveres Gandhi’s ideals of nonviolence, a stark contrast to the physical aggression of the sport he plays. Pandya uses this irony to underscore larger tensions within immigrant identity—between cultural heritage and American social norms, between familial duty and personal ambition.
Vikram isn’t the only one negotiating his place in the world. When an Indian restaurant owner casually refers to his white friends as “these American boys,” Vikram instinctively thinks, I’m an American boy too, yet chooses silence. This quiet moment speaks volumes about the novel’s deeper themes—how race, class, and privilege shape the performance of identity. Alongside Vikram, his friends MJ and Diego also wrestle with self-definition, revealing the universal struggle of adolescence intensified by cultural expectations.
Beneath the novel’s coming-of-age narrative runs a darker thread: the secrets parents keep and the pressures they unwittingly place on their children. Consumed by college applications and securing their futures, the adults in Our Beautiful Boys become catalysts for their sons’ transformation, forcing them to confront uncomfortable truths about themselves and the world they inhabit.
Pandya, whose previous novel Members Only was an NPR Best Book of 2020 and a finalist for the California Book Award in Fiction, in this work, continues his exploration of cultural dislocation and racial identity among South Asian Americans.
With Our Beautiful Boys, he delivers a poignant and suspenseful meditation on what it means to belong, both within one’s family and in the wider world.
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