What happened on Friday night? There was a high-school football game, of course; it is America, and our beautiful boys played like young gods! Then they gathered themselves, the quarterback and two running backs, and they went for Indian food, and then to a party with about a hundred other kids, a party within the ruins of a house set off the road and near three caves. Another story is in the making, an older story, an older question: What happened in the cave? How did Stanley Kincaid, a troublemaker par excellence, get beat to a pulp and skewered hundreds of times by cactus spines? Who put Kincaid in the Intensive Care Unit? Our beautiful boys are involved, there is no doubt of that, a hundred kids with cell phones taking videos, or just eyeballing the nightscape, attest to their presence coming down from the caves, but who did what, and who caused that level of damage to Stanley’s face and body, well that is a much more complicated question.
One hundred years after the publication of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Sameer Pandya gives us Our Beautiful Boys (400 pages; Ballantine Books). Maybe I’m wrong, but my reading finds Pandya’s novel an homage and an exorcism, a deep appreciation of Forster’s novel just as keenly as it is payback. What happened in that cave? Who attacked Adela Quested? is a question at the heart of A Passage to India, but answers are barely important within the license it lends the petty officialism of India’s British occupiers. A white woman has been terrorized, and putting aside whether or not this attack even actually happened, nonetheless the claim lends unassailable definition to the rightness of British dominance. Dr. Aziz is accused, a young, extremely handsome, well-educated Muslim doctor. Forster’s writing is forensic, not of whatever happened to Miss Quested in the cave, not of how the strap of her field glasses case came to be broken, no, that would be inane, diversionary; Forster’s novel takes apart the intense vitriol of racist attack, who teams with who, who insists on a story that fits his or her own ideological violence.
Sameer Pandya, bringing us forward, writing our time, is never not smart, and he’s a patient writer, and scenes are almost voluptuous in their development. We could be experiencing a conversation with the football coach, and yet still, there is this lush lassitude to the story’s unfolding, a jazz clarinet playing in the background. There is a scene, fairly late in the novel, involving cars and a valet and two of the fathers of our boys, and a fistfight arises with another man, and it’s not slow motion so much as it’s pageantry, atavism with Audis and Cadillacs. It’s as exhilarating as it is depressing, and no one wins.
Pandya has the very fine habit of excruciating characterization. I as a reader almost wish for the anodyne simplicity of category, stereotype, but no, his gorgeous Indian boy, Vikram, as brilliant a student as he is a football player, is as riddled with faults and human foible as any other character. No character in a Pandya world “stands for something” other than the complexity and irresolvability of any human animal. This is just one of the gifts of a Pandya world, a detailed, explicit setting out of the diversity of a middleclass Southern California, turning that inside out, showing all of its difficult hopeful beauty, this prickly and imperiled experiment in democracy.
Our Beautiful Boys is a gift arriving in bookstores, coming in like a lion, as approachable as a lamb. The novel’s prose is pellucid, straightforward, enveloping the reader, insinuating in the way serious fiction turns us in the culture, facets our seeing, our understanding. There is MJ, the beautiful blond god of a quarterback, on his way to Yale, no matter he suddenly stops bathing and wearing shoes. He doesn’t need footwear to get himself forward, and yet his Chinese-American girlfriend would rather eat a piece of cake with his mother than stay in his funk. Scene after scene serves up the gorgeous infuriating panopticon of perception, so refreshingly generative vision rather than the slamming door of judgment.
Michelle Latiolais is a Professor of English and Director of the Programs in Writing at the University of California at Irvine. The author of several books of fiction, her novels include She (Norton), Even Now, which received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California, and A Proper Knowledge (Bellevue Literary Press).