The Silences We Manage: An Interview w/ Sameer Pandya
Sameer Pandya is the author of the novel Members Only, a finalist for the California Book Award and an NPR “Books We Love” of 2020, and the story collection The Blind Writer, longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award. His cultural criticism has appeared in a range of publications, including the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Atlantic, Salon, and Sports Illustrated. A recipient of the PEN/Civitella Fellowship, he is currently an associate professor of Asian American studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Willard Cook likes to hang out with his dog Otis, write short stories and sit zazen.
Willard Cook: When did you first start writing or when did you become a writer? What drove you to writing?
Sameer Pandya: Throughout high school, I worked on the school newspaper. I had thought then that I was going to be a journalist. At that age, you usually have something you say you want to do as a type of placeholder when someone asks. But I genuinely wanted to be a journalist. I also had a terrific English teacher in the eleventh grade named Walter Sigg who I took two classes with. In his regular English class, we read A Farewell to Arms page by page. So basically, over the course of four months, we would read one page per class session and he would work through with us the language, the metaphors. I also took a creative writing class from him, and he introduced us to, amongst other things, imagism. He liked a poem I wrote about fishermen at the Berkeley marina. My first and last poem. I also wrote my first story in that class—about a kid riding a public bus home after school. That might have been the extent of the plot. I went off to college at UC Davis in the early 90s, and in those years, as now, they had a really amazing group of fiction writers, and I started taking classes from them to get a minor in English. You could take the creative writing workshops over and over again for credit. So I took five different creative writing workshops. And I got good responses from the faculty. And so, I think between that moment of writing an imagist poem in the eleventh grade and then the fact there was good receptivity to my writing in college, those are the two moments I think I can point to [that drove me to be a writer]. But my initial interest to be a journalist, to get details right, has also been important.
Willard: You've written a book of short stories, The Blind Writer. You've written the novel Members Only and now the novel Our Beautiful Boys. What were the forces that brought you to write this [particular book]?
Sameer: I’m raising teenage boys, so that has been top of mind. In doing this, I['ve begun] reliving my own adolescence through them and thinking about fathers and sons, mothers and sons. More practically, in the early months of the pandemic, I would spend a long time in the backyard of where we live. The Santa Barbara foothills are back there and I noticed in the hills there are, what look like from a distance, little holes. They are, in fact, old caves. For me, it’s hard to see caves and not think of E.M. Forster’s [novel] A Passage to India, [whose] inciting incident takes place in a cave. Forster conceptualizes the cave as a space of echo and indeterminacy. I basically took the cave from India and Forster’s fictional Chandrapore and moved it to California to a place that I call Chilesworth, and wondered what would happen in those caves that I saw from my backyard. And so that’s probably where all of this begins. I thought of four teenage boys, placed them in those caves, and went from there.
Willard: In Our Beautiful Boys, you deal a lot with the problems of being a young man. Being mean on the football field and that being this kind of catch-all for bravado or manhood. I'm curious as to why you chose that as a symbol. It seems, in a certain sense, too obvious, but then in another sense, it's not.
Sameer: I didn’t sit down and think, “Okay, I want to write about young men and the complicated nature of masculinity, so what sport best allows me to do that?” I haven’t been dying to write a football novel either. But I do love Don Delillo’s End Zone. I love Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, both the non-fiction book and the subsequent TV show. I love football. I love how complex it is. I love how troubled I am when I watch it and the fact that I continue to watch it. I had these characters in mind, particularly the Indian-American ones—the teenage Vikram and his father. The father had grown up in India under the idea of Gandhian non-violence. And the son comes home one day wanting to play football. And at some point early in the novel, the narrator asks, “Was there a sport more un-Gandhi than American football?” And so, in some ways, football became a fun thing to explore with these characters. When pros play the game, they know what they’re doing. They know what they've signed up for. They're getting cash for it. They know the dangers. But then you see these same rules applied to young teenage boys doing it, and it becomes far more troubling. They’re the same games, the same 100-yard field, but just such different physical bodies doing that work. And I think if I'm trying to work through this thin line between boyhood and manhood, football seemed like an interesting place to think through all of that.
Willard: You have Marianne Moore in the book; I'm curious about this. [I connect it to] this deep psychological strain that exists in the book around the pressures of what it is to be American, and the pressures of achievement. I'm wondering [what led you to] refer to Moore, how poetry has influenced your writing, and if you read poetry.
Sameer: Toward the end of the novel, two characters are discussing the differences between Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore and this young, very bright student refers to Dickinson, and I'm just quoting her, as being a bit of “a basic bitch.” She is trying to say that Moore is far more interesting. She is making particular reference to a poem called “Silence,” and this one line: “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; / not in silence, but restraint.” The core of the novel is about three young men who have engaged in a moment of violence, and they're all being silent about it for different reasons. Maybe this is why you are asking about the American strain of achievement, which is something that I've always been interested in. All three of these families are striving. These are, for the most part, upper middle-class families that are well off and so their relationship to striving is different from a first-generation student going to college for the first time.
To your question about poetry, I've always had a fraught relationship with it. That class I was telling you about [where I first discovered] I wanted to be a fiction writer, [that was] the last poem I wrote. I have wonderful friends who are poets and I read their work. But I don’t read poetry nearly as much as I should.
I do like this idea of a precocious 17-year-old distinguishing between why she thinks Marianne Moore is a greater poet than Emily Dickinson. Maybe it's something I wish I knew when I was seventeen, that I had the wherewithal to tell the difference. When I was seventeen I did not know, alas, who either Marianne Moore or Emily Dickinson were. But I was reading A Farewell to Arms, page by page.
“I think you make choices in terms of when to engage in silence and when it is important for you to speak. And so I think, in a way, our lives are filled with these kinds of choices every single day [as] we’re engaging with the people that we love around us.”
Willard: I guess I bring up the silence because it's so interesting to me how the three boys share a silence in shame for their violence, but also in conspiracy to not get caught. For me that was one of the most fascinating parts of the book.
Sameer: What's interesting to me, not just in the book, but more generally, if you've spent time with teenage boys, is they are not silent. They are noisy. They have all sorts of things to say. Their phones are noisy. Their everyday affect is noisy. Part of what I'm trying to explore in this novel is what happens at a moment when some of that noise finally stops. I think you're completely right, that they are both silent out of their own sense of wanting to protect themselves and there is this guilt. Now, by extension, I think the parents are silent as well. And that's part of the parallel narrative of how this moment in the cave not only upends the life of these three young men, but it upends the life of these three distinct families. I'm not always a fan of this idea of “the secrets we keep,” but I am a fan of the silences that we manage, the things that we decide to say and not to say. And I think there's a lot of that going on with these three families.
Willard: Besides Forster, what writers drive you, what writers excite you? [...] I'm a short story writer and I grew into my writing with Richard Ford, Ray Carver, Joy Williams, and Salinger. You read them over and over because you are wowed and say to yourself, “I'd like to write like that.”
Sameer: I think in all three of these books—The Blind Writer, Members Only, and now Our Beautiful Boys—the part of the sandbox I've played in quite a bit is around notions of American men and their sadness, their failures, and the women that prop them up. And I think the writer who I've always looked to as the best ethnographer of that is John Cheever. Cheever has worked through this idea of the limits of upper middle-class joy, and what that means for the men that populate his stories. Cheever has always been important in a funny, ironic way. One of the characters in this new novel, Michael Barringer, has a tattoo that he's not shown any one. It’s the first line of a novel by V.S. Naipaul. And Naipaul is a deeply problematic writer in his treatment of gender and race, and yet there is something about the clarity of his writing that I have always turned to. More recently, Sigrid Nunez is just a very funny, sharp writer. She wears her deep knowledge really lightly and just has such a light touch with all that she does. Ralph Ellison, [as an] essayist and novelist, [has] always been important. And finally, Updike’s Rabbit is never too far away from the crisis these men in the novel are experiencing.
Willard: [Do] friends or family appear in your work?
Sameer: You know, I have lots of friends and lots of family, and I don't live a hermetic life. And so there's no way that they don't seep into my work. My job is to just not make them seep in on a one-to-one basis. It's not fair to them. It's not fair to me. With friends and family, you really, really want to be careful and so I've tried to do that. And then there are other times where I'm more explicit about it. There’s a photograph in Our Beautiful Boys that I give [to] the Indian-American family as an heirloom. But it’s a photograph that my own grandfather took. So there are things from real life that I can physically place in my fiction.
Willard: Little bit of an odd question, but do you consider yourself a liar? When speaking of family and friends, [do you feel] that you are exposing yourself, your vulnerabilities, your likes and dislikes of the people around you. And along with that, [is there] the fear that your family or friends are going to find out how you really feel? [This is related to] the question of how fiction writers lie in order to tell the truth.
Sameer: The question really is: how good of a liar are you? And how that allows you to write better or worse fiction. Of course, I consider myself a liar. I think socially, a certain amount of lying goes on every single day. If we did not do that and it was all unfiltered opinions, I don't think that would be sensible. It doesn't mean I'm dishonest with the people around me, but I think you make choices in terms of when to engage in silence and when it is important for you to speak. And so I think, in a way, our lives are filled with these kinds of choices every single day [as] we're engaging with the people that we love around us. What is it that parents say to their children? What is it that children say to their parents? I think there's a good amount of old-fashioned lying that goes on.
Willard: Joan Didion has said that writing is a hostile act because the writer is trying to impose their will upon you. So when you write something, are you trying to impose your will on the reader? I'll speak a little bit about myself. I like to write, in a certain sense, as revenge against my family. That is a hostile act. I make up stories about my family and that is the cathartic element to writing fiction more so than other kinds of writing. Do you feel it's cathartic?
Sameer: Let's start with your initial idea from Didion about writing being a hostile act. It is and it isn’t.
I don't really feel that my job is to impose my will on my reader. I am engaging in a negotiation. Reader, this is who I think you think these characters are. And in the process of this book, I'm going to try to break them down and show you layers of them that you did not expect. And so for me, it feels like much more of a negotiated act. And here the reader is not passive. My will is not being imposed upon them. But to your second question, about catharsis, you feel it when you finish a project. A book has the potential to go on forever. There are endless strands. But nobody wants to read an endless book. No one wants to read anything [beyond] 350 or 400 pages. Talk about imposing your will on a reader. And so I think that when you construct something, when you finish it, that is the other aspect of the catharsis that I feel.
Willard: What do you do after you finish a book? Do you go out and celebrate? I was actually reading a thing about Cheever. He said, “I go to Europe after I finish something. I drink and get drunk over in Europe.”
Sameer: For me, there are micro and macro celebrations. The finishing of a book takes a long time. You finish it in [one] sense when you sell it. Then you go through the editorial process, then you go through the copywriting process. So all along the way, you have to take little, small victories. But then when it is finally off to printing, I do celebrate. I teach and I have a family and so I can’t just go off to Cheever’s Europe. But California is a good place to celebrate something. But at the same time, I also feel anxious when I finish. You have these questions: Am I going to be able to do this again? Am I going to be able to execute an idea again? I deeply celebrate and I'm deeply anxious, and both things just have to live together.
Willard: And just to circle back to the novel, [...] you really feel the generational influence in this novel, the parents to the children. Did you research your characters? Did you research Veronica? Did you research Gita or Shirley? The women, to my thinking, are quite hard-edged, but there's clearly cultural delineations that you make. And do you do that by intuition, or do you do it by research? How do you get to that place?
Sameer: I did some research, but I tried not to get overwhelmed by it. For example, Gita worked as a management consultant. I researched that, I asked friends who've done the work. When you're writing realist fiction in the way that I am, I think getting details right is important. I really hate reading books where people get details wrong. I've been teaching on a college campus forever. I hate reading a campus novel where a writer gets certain things wrong. So I tried to do all of that research, but after that, these are just characters that I am digging into and I'm going to have to live or die by my intuitions about them. Veronica Cruz is a historian, an academic. And so I didn't need to do research on her because I know Veronicas. I know the books that they write, the kinds of research that they do, what their bookshelves look like, what their teaching looks like. On the whole, I try to do as little research as possible when I am first drafting a book. I do more of it when I have some sense of the characters down on the page.
Willard: Talk a little bit about when you first published “M-O-T-H-E-R” in Epiphany and the role literary journals have played in your writing life.
Sameer: Yeah, I'm looking at my shelf right now—the Epiphany issue from 2006/2007. When I was trying to figure out how to become a fiction writer, I think the idea was that it occurred gradually. You wrote short stories, and you found literary journals to publish them in, you published four or five, and then you could begin to think about having a collection. And the incredible benefit of getting stories published in journals is you’re getting editorial help along the way. An editor would say, “Hey, I like this story. These are the things that I think the story needs to do to make it stronger.” And that was hugely beneficial. Each time you get a publication, you feel a little bit more confident. That you can write a longer story, that you can maybe move from one point of view to another, you can experiment with diction, or you can experiment with dialogue.
A couple of years ago, you invited me to edit one of your issues, and that was a very different experience. For the first time I was not the one asking to be published. I was the one reading submissions of people who would like to be published. And being on this side of the process, I took the job very seriously. I wanted to do for writers what other writers and editors had done for me.
Willard: The one other thing that I noticed in the novel is this element of ambition that falls more with the parents. The boys are in this [environment] where parents get so excited when their kids go to the right school. That notion MJ rejects, not completely, but there's an ambivalence at the end. As well with Diego, we don't necessarily get a sense [of his feelings] one way or the other.
But talk a little bit about that ambition. It's a very powerful aspect of the novel. These kids are getting hammered by the [idea that] they have to succeed. Veronica is just pounding on Diego. She, in some sense, compromises her attitudes about football just to have her son succeed in that venue.
Sameer: I've thought about this a lot. What does college—as a market of ambition— represent for these three sets of parents? There are three ways that I'm trying to think about college. First, the idea that after high school you go to college. That's part of the social contract of these families. Second, where a kid goes to college is a marker of how successful you have been as a parent. So that if the kid goes to college X, which is ranked higher than college Y, it is a reflection of his or her skills, but it is also a reflection of your own parenting that created the guardrails, or knocked down the barriers for them to get there. And then third, where your kid gets into college is a kind of consumption. You buy a nice car to signal who you are and what is important to you. You buy an expensive watch. You say we are vacationing in the Piedmont region of Italy. You say all of these things as a marker of your privilege. Is college one more piece of that kind of performance of consumption? But at the same time, these parents love their children. What happens when ambition and desire and love come up against one night in a cave that is going to mess up all of what these boys have worked toward?
Willard: I want to leave it there, because I could talk about this for days.
Sameer: Thank you for the terrific questions.
