Members Only

February 10, 2020
In Pandya’s tense, sly debut novel (after the collection The Blind Writer) a college lecturer faces accusations of racism and anti-American bias in a California suburb over the course of a fateful week. Having immigrated to the U.S. from India as a child, Raj Bhatt has settled into a quiet life with his wife and children; they have a house in a comfortable neighborhood, their children attend a great school, and they belong to a tennis club. Still, Raj continues to feel like an outsider. Things come to a head when Raj tries to connect with a prospective African-American couple at the club. Unfortunately, an effort to put the man at ease about his purported need to work on his tennis game (“Nigga, please,” Raj says) has the opposite effect, and it earns him accusations of racism by the club’s white members. The next day, he faces another group outraged by his words, this time from right-wing students who organize a protest against him over objections to his credible lectures on the history of American slavery. After a recorded confrontation with them goes viral, Raj begins to reckon with the disharmony in his new life. The taut, heartrending narrative offers deep insight into the ways the characters are shaped by racism. Pandya’s sympathetic portrait of Raj’s quest for acceptance will resonate with readers.

March 1, 2020
Over the course of a week, an Indian American professor's life spirals out of control. University lecturer Raj Bhatt loves the exclusive Tennis Club, TC for short, to which he and his family belong even though he has always felt uncomfortable as one of its few nonwhite members. When, in an effort to connect with a black couple who want to join the club, he lets slip a slur in front of the membership committee, the other members of the TC are horrified. Raj feels awful, but he can't help wondering why the racial slights he's faced during his time there haven't received the same attention. Meanwhile, after students in his anthropology class send video of him supposedly criticizing Christianity and the West to a right-wing website, he finds himself in the middle of an internet firestorm that threatens his job. Suddenly, he's being labeled a racist and a reverse-racist simultaneously. This first novel from Pandya (The Blind Writer, 2015) aims to skewer both the upper-crust milieu of exclusive country clubs and conservative campus culture, and it partially succeeds. Pandya is sharply critical of right-wing "news" sites and conservative students who argue against any critique of the West, but his depiction of these phenomena is not totally believable. Pandya focuses on website comments, not social media or Reddit (the hubs of online hate today), and Raj's outraged students feel more like convenient obstacles than real people. Also, while he captures the details of the country-club setting, he doesn't examine the politics of those characters as closely. The novel's satirical edge might have been more effective if Raj were either more sympathetic or more odious. The novel ultimately sides with him, but he causes many of his problems himself and is irritating enough that it's hard to feel too sorry for him. A readable but frustrating critique of contemporary politics that lacks bite.

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Starred review from March 1, 2020
PEN longlisted writer Pandya (The Blind Writer, 2015) delivers a grand slam of a first novel. Raj Bhatt, an untenured professor of anthropology at a California university, father of two young boys, loving husband, enthusiastic amateur tennis player, and the only nonwhite member of a private tennis club, makes a racist joke to an African American couple during their membership interview. The fallout propels Raj through a week of personal and professional conflict: He awaits a medical diagnosis, reflects on his bicultural upbringing as an Indian American immigrant, and fights a push for his firing led by students filled with incoherent white rage. This realistic, character-driven novel with multiple, exceptionally well developed, threads of suspense engages contemporary identity politics and what it means to belong?to a club, to a racial group, to a country, and to various cultures and subcultures. The majority of the action occurs over the course of one week, a fast-paced structure akin to Ian McEwan's Saturday (2005), though both writers manage to slow down enough to offer quiet moments that accentuate the protagonists' interior lives. Pandya's writing here is smooth, clear, funny, and often subtly beautiful. Members Only is the thoughtful page-turner we need right now.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)