RavePopMattersThe premise of...Our Beautiful Boys, is clever ... While moments of Our Beautiful Boys feel like a whodunit, the story works because it defies genre. It is a combination of mystery, coming of age, identity, and choices, but not in a way that feels like the author is trying too hard ... Pandya has a gift for capturing dialogue among different populations: teens, professors, couples, families, and even football players. He writes not as an outsider overhearing the most intimate moments but as an insider with a beautiful approach to writing from a place of knowing. The dissolution of marriages, adolescent uncertainty, intergenerational feudalism, tenure-track politics, workplace drama, and school toxicity are all tackled creatively here ... So much of the material in Our Beautiful Boys feels familiar but not clichéd ... Handles two issues exceedingly well: married life and racial politics ... At its most vulnerable places, Our Beautiful Boys takes on the complexity of privilege, racial passing, stereotypes, discrimination, hierarchies, and the model minority. Sameer Pandya goes where few writers do, mining the pain experienced by parents who may have lived their whole lives in the US but still wrestle with figuring out America’s existential crises.
PositivePopMattersIntriguing ... Keen insight ... Does not feel like science fiction but rather a commentary on a near future that seems frighteningly close, just out of view.
Hilton Als
PositivePop MattersWhile the subject matter of the essays seems fairly easy to discern – Richard Pryor, Buddy Ebsen, Andre Leon Talley, Louise Brooks and Jean-Michel Basquiat – reading Als work is fraught with difficulty, most notably in his Faulknerian tendency of moving from third person to first person and then back with seemingly no indication of an impending transition ... Als’ gift is his reinvention of famous figures, but from the angle of how well they succeeded or failed to confront white supremacy and privilege, or in their (in)abilities to give blacks a voice ... A volume of fine, albeit confusing, writing by a man who refuses to be boxed in to any one genre.
