By Debra Herrick

Photos by Jeff Liang

Early in Sameer Pandya’s new novel, four teenagers wander into a Southern California cave. It’s a moonlit scene, heavy with adolescent swagger, the precarious balance between friendship and rivalry hanging in the air. When only three emerge unscathed, readers are plunged into a literary thriller exploring secrets, privilege and the blurry ethics of identity.

In “Our Beautiful Boys” (Ballantine, 2025), Pandya, an associate professor of Asian American studies at UC Santa Barbara, frames his narrative around a central ambiguity inspired by E.M. Forster’s “A Passage to India,” where an incident in a cave leaves questions of truth unanswered. Pandya transplants that uncertainty to contemporary California, intertwining race, privilege and passing — both racial and social — into a story that ripples outward through families and friendships.

Vikram, one of the novel’s teenage protagonists, is caught between two worlds: the idealistic nonviolence of his Indian American family, symbolized by a prominently displayed photograph of Gandhi, and the aggressive physicality of American high school football. Pandya underscores the irony: Is there a sport more un-Gandhian than football?

“Vikram excels precisely because of his strength and aggression — traits seemingly at odds with his parents’ values,” Pandya, also the author of “Members Only” (HarperCollins, 2020), says in an interview. This internal contradiction runs throughout the novel, highlighting broader tensions around immigrant identity, masculinity and family expectations.

Yet Vikram isn’t alone in shaping his identity to navigate his suburban world. When an Indian restaurant owner dismisses his white friends as “these American boys,” Vikram thinks, “I’m an American boy too,”  but stays silent, strategically shifting identities based on context. Each of the teenage protagonists — Vikram, MJ and Diego — carefully crafts his sense of self, reflecting Pandya’s broader exploration of American identity, shaped as much by class and privilege as by race.

MJ’s wealth grants him a certain aloofness, crystallized by his refusal to wear shoes — a choice he considers carefree but his father points out as a subtle marker of privilege. Similarly, MJ’s home, filled with inherited furniture, quietly signals inherited social capital. Pandya peppers his novel with a litany of status symbols — watches, cars and insider trading, fine fish, upscale produce and leisure activities — shifting in value depending on perspective. “I’ve always been interested in money, class, privilege and how we use objects to leverage status,” he says.

Diego, a gifted math student and football player, is raised by his mother, an academic whose carefully curated identity complicates notions of authenticity and clout. In her portrayal, Pandya subverts traditional narratives of racial passing and examines how identity shifts within families: “We often think about identity as individually performed,” Pandya notes, “but within domesticity — an entire family — how does it shift?”

Beneath these identity performances lies a darker undercurrent: hidden family truths. Parents, consumed by college applications and securing their children’s futures, inadvertently become catalysts for their children’s transition from boys to men. “Teenagers are far savvier about race than we sometimes give them credit for,” Pandya says. “They’ve lived through discussions on racial reality, the post-racial and the return of race. They’re extremely perceptive; they’re just figuring out how to navigate it.”

"So much that's unspoken..."

At the same time, “Our Beautiful Boys” discreetly functions as a sports novel, using football to explore how teenage boys navigate intimacy beneath their bravado. “It’s how boys are intimate without being intimate,” Pandya says, describing sports as a language of friendship and a conduit for learning to express regret and disappointment.

“There’s so much that’s unspoken in this novel,” says Bakirathi Mani, the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. “The violence at the center of the story is one layer — but there’s also racial violence, class violence and the kinds of damage families do to one another quietly.”

The novel’s intrigue deepens through Pandya’s handling of multiple perspectives, a departure from his earlier first-person narratives. Shifting viewpoints augment readers’ empathy and complicate simple judgments. What happened in the cave? Who’s to blame? And what happens when no one talks, but everyone knows something?

In this silence, the parents become desperate. They’re used to managing, orchestrating, fixing. But here, their children refuse to explain, and it’s destabilizing. “The novel keeps asking, ‘Are the parents complicit?’” Mani says. “Because while they’re accusing the boys of keeping secrets, they’re all harboring secrets themselves.”

And those secrets aren’t abstract. They’re embedded in Cadillacs, status watches, grocery lists, even college essays. In one of the novel’s threads, Vikram writes a personal statement about a photograph of Gandhi that hangs in his living room. It’s a symbol of inheritance, of performance, of memory — and, it turns out, it's a photograph taken by Pandya’s own grandfather.

“The trick is using different characters to explore various issues,” Pandya says. By capturing multiple angles of the same incident, Pandya mirrors the cave’s echoes, where truth fractures unpredictably. Structured as a whodunit, the narrative compels readers to question not only what occurred but why. “There’s something about caves,“ he adds. “The echoes and darkness make truth and reality slippery.”

In “Our Beautiful Boys,” the stories we inherit are just as consequential as the ones we choose to tell. Pandya’s characters live inside a thicket of expectations: racial, familial, social. They lie to protect each other, but also to preserve a version of themselves they’re still trying to believe in.

Pandya isn’t offering clean answers. He’s asking the harder question: How do we raise boys to tell the truth in a world where everyone’s faking something?

Following this feature, we’re publishing an excerpt from “Our Beautiful Boys” — a short but charged kitchen scene between Vikram, his mother Gita and his father Gautam. It’s a deceptively simple conversation about football, extracurriculars and college applications, but it hums with the novel’s deepest contradictions.

“It felt like the right slice to share,” Pandya explains, “especially for a college alumni audience. There’s something so now about how early these kids — and their parents — start thinking about college. The anxiety lives in everyone.”

And once again, that quiet symbol of Gandhi appears. “It’s a family defined by nonviolence,” Pandya says. “And Vikram’s skill at football — this violent sport — sits in direct contradiction to that. That tension, that irony, is doing a lot of the novel’s heavy lifting.”

In the excerpt, there are no blowups or revelations. Just three people in a kitchen, circling around the future. And like the rest of the novel, the heat comes not from what’s said — but from what no one wants to say out loud.