Reviewed by Rod McLary
There is sometimes a moment in our lives when unexpectedly the world shifts; when the wind changes, and then suddenly nothing is the same again.
Our Beautiful Boys chronicles one such moment in the lives of sixteen-year-olds Vikram, Diego and MJ – all celebrating their team’s victory in a high school football match. Diego and MJ are long-standing team members but Vikram is a newcomer encouraged by his parents to join the team and thus enhance his chances of being accepted at an Ivy League college. To celebrate their victory, the boys join an ill-advised party in an abandoned house in the hills near some culturally significant caves. But before they go up to the house, they have dinner together where Stanley – a class mate with few social skills or boundaries – joins them. Hours later, Stanley stumbles from the caves badly injured and in great pain. All three boys were present and were seen with Stanley – both as a group and individually – before he emerged from the caves.
The consequent investigation by the school principal and her interviews with the boys and their parents are intended to identify the boy responsible for Stanley’s injuries. But the course of the investigation exposes cracks in the boys’ friendship as they begin to question whether each can be trusted not to betray the others. Adding to the tension, as the boys’ families are interviewed, those contentious issues of masculinity, race and privilege are drawn into sharp relief. All three boys – or at least their parents – have an expectation that they will attend an Ivy League college, and the outcome of the investigation could easily derail such expectations. Each boy’s place in the school hierarchy is determined – in somewhat derogatory terms – by their cultural background: Vikram is a ‘7/11’ that is Asian rather than Middle Eastern which is ‘9/11’; Diego is a ‘Latino’, that is someone from Mexico; and MJ is white American.
To add another layer to the complex narrative, the parents have their own issues which are exacerbated by the ongoing investigation. Veronica – Vikram’s mother – is a well-respected academic on the speaker circuit but, at one such event, she is confronted by an audience member accusing her of cultural appropriation and ‘serious elision’ [158], that is, omitting in her writings significant aspects of native history. And perhaps more seriously, she is later accused by a colleague of misrepresenting her ethnicity. Meanwhile, MJ’s father is struggling to find funds to pay out his investors before legal action is taken against him. Vikram’s father is desperate to make a significant sale for his employer to convince his superiors that he is the equal of any of his competitive colleagues and ready for promotion.
These issues allow the author to bring under scrutiny those sociological issues confronting every community – the implicit divisions of race, class and privilege – and cultural appropriation and the writing of the history of indigenous peoples from a colonial perspective. These are all forensically examined through the course of the narrative which interposes the boys’ investigation and the parents’ dynamics – both within and without the family.
The author has crafted a multi-layered narrative which offers so much more than simply a story about privileged students and their parents attempting to avoid responsibility for a serious assault. The novel canvasses the broader issues of race, culture and privilege while at the same time creating a tense psychological thriller as the sequence of events in the caves is gradually exposed.
Beautifully and intelligently written, Our Beautiful Boys is well recommended.
Our Beautiful Boys
[2025]
by Sameer Pandya
Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 978 1 5266 7692 4
$32.99; 388pp