A Review of Sameer Pandya’s Members Only

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A Review of Sameer Pandya’s Members Only

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Members Only by Sameer Pandya

2020 must be the year of the Asian American sports novels. Following the brilliances found in both Quan Barry’s We Ride Upon Sticks (field hockey) and Gish Jen’s The Resisters (baseball), Sameer Pandya’s Members Only (Houghton Mifflin, 2020) brings us into the racially fraught world of both tennis and academics. Pandya is of course the author of the outstanding collection The Blind Writer, which I earlier reviewed on AALF. Let’s let the official Houghton page give us some more key information about Pandya’s polemic novel: “First the white members of Raj Bhatt’s posh tennis club call him racist. Then his life falls apart. Along the way, he wonders: where does he, a brown man, belong in America? Raj Bhatt is often unsure of where he belongs. Having moved to America from Bombay as a child, he knew few Indian kids. Now middle-aged, he lives mostly happily in California, with a job at a university. Still, his white wife seems to fit in better than he does at times, especially at their tennis club, a place he’s cautiously come to love. But it’s there that, in one week, his life unravels. It begins at a meeting for potential new members: Raj thrills to find an African American couple on the list; he dreams of a more diverse club. But in an effort to connect, he makes a racist joke. The committee turns on him, no matter the years of prejudice he’s put up with. And worse still, he soon finds his job is in jeopardy after a group of students report him as a reverse racist, thanks to his alleged ‘anti-Western bias.’ Heartfelt, humorous, and hard-hitting, Members Only explores what membership and belonging mean, as Raj navigates the complicated space between black and white America.” Pandya’s novel starts out with a racial controversy, one that is perhaps ever more acute given the state of America at this very moment. Raj sits in a very uneasy position at his local tennis club, one of the very few minorities, so when his racially insensitive joke falls on deaf ears, he is forced to reconsider his place not only in the club but also his positionality vis-à-vis other racial groups. What resonates with me the most is the complicated way in which racial discourses are used to police those who are advocating for racial justice in the first place. This conundrum is best apparent in the fact that Raj is considered not being politically correct in relation to his tennis club, even as the club itself has been mired in structural racisms in the way that it selectively admits new members. The other element that was absolutely fascinating was the way in which the liberal faculty member finds himself in a problematic position with respect to politically oriented lectures that are then weaponized against him. Pandya’s representation reminds us of the way in which the university is also a corporate site with students that function as consumers. The question that this particular plot development brings up is the possibilities of academic freedom in light of student expectations about what a good education might or might not be. The strongest characteristic of the novel is no doubt Pandya’s incisive character depiction. Written in the first person, Raj reads as a no-nonsense figure, one who becomes enmeshed in circumstances that are almost outside of his control. I use the word “almost” because there’s always a sense that Raj is going to do whatever he can to advocate for his strong sense of justice, giving this novel a firm and compelling foundation. Oh, and the novel is of course, well suited to fans of tennis, though I must admit, I wish there was a little bit more of those elements in there =).