All-points bulletin: Missing protagonist alert in contemporary South Asian American novels. The West Coast–based, cisgender, hetero male character.

I’m concerned that entire generations of South Asian American men are disappearing from literature. This is alarming because of the numbers: There are 4.4 million Indian Americans in this country, according to the latest census figures. If you add Pakistani Americans and Bangladeshi Americans, the numbers swell to over 5 million—and the majority live in California.

Sure, there are several significant novelists (Akhil Sharma, Amitava Kumar, Ayad Akhtar) tucked away back East, but are any of these writers exploring the experiences of young, 21st-century South Asian American men in California or any of the other Western states?

I have been searching for these books for my sons, who are growing up in a world where they won’t have the mirror that a realistic novel can provide. This feels dangerous to me, not just for them but for American literature and culture in general. If there aren’t more explorations of the members of this huge population, then it is easier to stereotype and dismiss them.

Enter Sameer Pandya, whose novel Our Beautiful Boys puts Indian American male characters at the center of a novel investigating masculinity, parenting, marriage, and race in a suburban Southern California community.

This isn’t Pandya’s first time investigating these themes. The Blind Writer, his first collection of fiction, published in 2015, primarily examines the lives of contemporary Indian American men, mostly overeducated and yearning for connection. But it was the brilliant opening chapter of Pandya’s 2020 campus novel Members Only, set in Santa Barbara, in which a slightly drunk, middle-aged professor, Raj Bhatt, lets loose a casual N-word during an interview at an elite tennis club, that clarified for me the complexity of writing into this elusive protagonist. There, Pandya starts investigating South Asian masculinity and its diminishments through the lenses of sports, academia, and, of course, race.

He returns to this terrain with swagger in Our Beautiful Boys, which begins when high school junior Vikram Shastri is recruited onto his school’s football team due to his large stature. After a winning game and a celebratory dinner, Vikram and two of the team’s other star players, MJ and Diego, head to a party in the hills above town, where they get into an altercation with another student named Stanley in a cave. Though it seems they disperse after an initial quick fight, Stanley later emerges from the cave severely injured. The three football players are suspended from school. Thus begins a weeklong investigation into what might have happened that night.

The football players’ three families and their stories come into sharp focus. Gautam and Gita Shastri’s marriage has grown distant since their daughter left for college the year before. The work of Diego’s single mother, Veronica Cruz, an academic, is called into question. MJ’s parents, Michael and Shirley Berringer, may have generational wealth to spare, but Michael is facing his own career fallout.

The whole setup is an homage to E.M. Forster’s 1924 novel A Passage to India, in which a British woman accuses an Indian man of a sexual assault in the caves outside of town. Much of that novel is spent delving into the divide between Indians and their colonial overseers. In a 2024 essay about reading Passage, Pandya writes, “From paragraph to paragraph, and sometimes within paragraphs, Forster will make point-of-view shifts without any clear signal that he is doing so,” and in Our Beautiful Boys, Pandya, too, plays with point of view shifts; sometimes I wondered how Pandya chose whose interiority to reveal and when.

Just as Passage explored colonialism through a range of characters contending with accusations, Our Beautiful Boys examines race in California, but the results are mixed. Vikram’s father, Gautam, has a strained relationship with his wife, Gita, who gave up her career to be a homemaker only to feel like her husband didn’t keep up his side of the bargain. He’s a software developer who recently transferred to the business side of the industry but hasn’t managed to have serious success—though that changes over the course of the novel, shifting the balance between the couple. The details of Gautam’s career are especially satisfying in terms of exploring the Indian American tech worker and the reality of who gets promoted and why.

The Berringers have a similar marital dynamic, with Michael’s career in secret free fall—and his wife’s family wealth saving the day. Unfortunately, Gita and Shirley don’t receive much time on the already- crowded stage, and when they do, I wished for the stronger decision to stay in the POVs of the male characters, since both of the women came off as similarly and flatly dissatisfied housewives. And Diego’s mother Veronica’s subplot of being a successful scholar who has allowed people to believe she’s Latina when she’s not could have been its own novel. While I reveled in Pandya’s explorations of the intricacies of academia, which I remembered from Members Only, and I felt pulled toward Veronica, I also felt distracted by her.

It was difficult to find a rationale for some of Pandya’s choices, but admirably, he doesn’t let any of his characters off the hook. He demonstrates the turmoil of middle age and how it intersects with the impossible job of shepherding children through the crucial years of late high school, when every decision could alter their future.

Our Beautiful Boys is a clarion call to all of us as writers and readers to pay more attention to both the elusive South Asian American male and to the power of complex novels bursting at the seams with vivid characters, literary homage, and beautiful writing.•

Neelanjana Banerjee’s writing has appeared in Teen Vogue, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Chicago Quarterly Reader, and many other places. She is the managing editor of Kaya Press and teaches at UCLA and Loyola Marymount University. She lives in Los Angeles.