Members only, by Sameer Pandya

None of us during this pandemic year are having a particularly good time, but the week that Raj, the protagonist in Pandya’s new novel, has is certainly a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad time. It will make you thankful you aren’t him. Raj, a PhD in anthropology earned at Columbia, has failed to do the one thing that would advance his career, publish. As a result, he teaches large lecture classes in an unnamed California state school rather than continuing in the more prestigious job he left in New York. But he loves to teach, loves his wife, Eva, and his two sons, Neel and Arun. Both Raj and Eva grew up in the Bay Area and missed the sunniness of the climate and the ability to have a comfortable, affordable home. Raj, a devoted tennis player, is one of the very few members of color at their tennis club, which Eva, native-born and white, had belonged to and loved as a child. As the book opens, he has been invited for the first time to sit on the committee that will make decisions on the admission of new members, and there, he makes an unforgivable “joke” to a distinguished couple of Black doctors who are being sponsored by an imperious fellow doctor. Things rapidly go downhill from there – near the end of the week, his older son has gotten in serious trouble at his school; a group of students has accused him of being anti-Western and Christian and are holding a hunger strike calling for his dismissal; what he said in class that sets this in motion has gone viral on the web; he is being stalked by Robert, a loner student of his who may have initiated this movement; and he even has a suspicious mole on his foot removed and is waiting anxiously for the verdict of a biopsy. What more can go wrong? Well, lots. Underlying this often wry and funny book are considerations about race, class, and justice in this country, and Raj’s own questioning of his place in it. Thoughtful but never boring. 345 pp.