Our beautiful boys A novel

If not for the alcohol and adrenaline, Vikram, Diego, and MJ might have sensed school bully Stanley's sadness at the party after the football team's triumphant win. But in Pandya's (Members Only, 2020) remarkable novel about race, privilege, and masculinity at a California high school, Stanley ends up hospitalized, and Vikram, Diego, and MJ, the football team's star players, are suspended, jeopardizing their college prospects. The boys clam up, and relationships falter as their parents, who have their own secrets, scramble to protect them. Pandya avoids cliché, going to the heart of each character's humanity, uncovering the permutations and inconsistencies of identity and privilege. For example, Diego's friends, "the Oaxacans," joke about his "deep bougie status," an advantage of his mother's successful academic career researching the slave trade in Brazil. Vikram's mother worries he will take the fall, being neither white like MJ, nor brown in the way Diego is. Our Beautiful Boys is a moving, suspenseful portrayal of young men pushing past the bounds of "all the people that had come before" on the complicated playing field of American identity.

In Pandya's riveting latest (after Members Only), a Southern California high school is roiled when three football players are accused of assaulting a classmate. Running back Vikram Shastri, a junior and first-generation Indian American, joins the team late in the season and scores two touchdowns in his first game. His celebratory dinner with cocaptains Diego Cruz and MJ Berringer is crashed by bully and drug dealer Stanley Kincaid, who invites the three to a party in a former Native American cave dwelling. There, a drunk Stanley mouths off and lunges at Vikram. He and the others fend off Stanley and leave him in the cave with a split lip. When Stanley emerges later that night, however, he's mysteriously in much worse shape. After he's hospitalized, the school principal begins an investigation and calls in the parents, and the boys forge a pact to stay silent. As tensions ignite between the families along class and racial lines, the boys' pact breaks down and the plot ramps up. Pandya explores the controversy from multiple angles as it affects Vikram's father's chances of moving up at his tech job; mars the reputation of Diego's single mother, a Latin American historian at UCLA; and exacerbates hidden tensions in the seemingly perfect marriage of MJ's wealthy white parents. This is a stunner. Agent: Seth Fishman, Gernert Co. (Mar.)