Our Beautiful Boys by Sameer Pandya review – teenage lives at the crossroads
The Marabar caves in A Passage to India represent the breakdown of order and communication as well as provoking the terrible accusation that drives EM Forster's story. Sameer Pandya plays with a similar plot device in his compelling US-based novel, including an epigraph from Forster's classic.
It is set in southern California, where three teenage boys on the brink of adulthood – stars of their high school American football team with promising college careers ahead of them – attend a party at an abandoned house in the hills. Vikram is an Indian American, while Diego, who is Latino, lives with his academic mother. MJ is white with wealthy parents. Part of the pleasure of Pandya's writing lies in his unravelling of identity politics – a theme explored in his debut, Members Only.
In one of three ancient caves, the teenagers confront Stanley Kincaid, a school bully and drug dealer. He drunkenly lunges at them and they hit back to 'calm him down'. Later Stanley emerges from the cave bloodied and battered and accuses the boys of assaulting him, claiming that one of them returned and beat him so badly he had to pretend to pass out. Stanley is hospitalised, the boys are suspended and their brilliant trajectories into college are abruptly threatened.
As the school principal investigates the various rumours swirling around the school and tries to ascertain what actually happened, the families meet to assess and limit the damage to their children's prospects. Along the way we learn of their troubled professional and home lives and realise the boys are carrying the weight of their parents' expectations.
Pandya, an associate professor in Asian-American studies at the University of California, clearly knows this world. He gets under the skin of his three principals, their hopes, aspirations and uncertainties, contrasting these with the ideals and politics of their parents. Our Beautiful Boys reveals the inequality of America's education system – how it rewards those with money and influence – and is a profound meditation on identity, class, privilege and masculinity.
Our Beautiful Boys by Sameer Pandya is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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