New novel explores our revulsion and fascination with violence

Centred on three teenage "all stars" who attend a party in a deserted cave that ends with the school bully being seriously injured, the book explores the dynamics of masculinity, race, privilege, and the conflict that arises when all these collide.

An award-winning author and associate professor in Asian-American studies at the University of California, Sameer Pandya tells RNZ’s Saturday Morningwhy these themes will resonate with parents everywhere.

The three boys at the heart of the novel, Vikram, Diego and MJ, all play American football, a sport that both repulses and fascinates Pandya, he says.

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“The sport makes me sick to my stomach.

“And as it should, because when someone gets hurt on the field of play, you know, one of the things I noticed going to some of these high school football games is as a part of the rules, there is an ambulance waiting on the side of the field every single game.

“And yet, at the same time, whether it's the high school version or the pro version, I can't look away. I can't stop watching it because there's a certain beauty in the violence.”

How we deal with this attraction to, and revulsion of violence is a central theme in Our Beautiful Boys, he says.

“Part of what I'm trying to work through in this book is not necessarily to cast judgment, but the ways in which to think about how we, of course, abhor violence, and yet the ways in which we end up engaging with it at the same time.

“And I think what I was mostly interested in is how we, without losing our minds, how do we manage the violence and our desire to be non-violent both at the same time?”

This is a particularly fraught problem for boys not yet fully evolved into young men, he says.

“In writing these teenage boys, I was writing myself as a 16 and 17-year-old.

“With my own kids, I drive them around for the last two, three years. I've been driving them and their teenage friends around.

“And if you've been in a car with teenage boys, it is constant chatter, constant talk. They're never silent. They have so many different things to say.

“And so, I think a part of this book was also trying to give grace to these boys.”

The trash talk which features in the novel, and which he hears as he ferries his sons and their friends around, is a form of intimacy, he believes.

“It is a way in which these young men are able to be intimate with one another without saying, I am being intimate with you.

“And intimacy is a complicated thing. Intimacy can be, in this case, violent, or intimacy can be fearful.”

The struggles of boys and young men is topical, with TV shows such as Adolescence casting a light on how boys navigate the various pressures of modern life.

Pandya says he hopes to add to this conversation.

“I think the job of the novelist is to hear the the quiet rumblings and see if you can amplify them a little bit.”

His intention was not to provide any concrete answers, he says.

“As a novelist, what I am able to do and what I wanted to try to do was get their points of view, to listen to Vikram as he's thinking about what he may or may not have done, MJ when he's thinking through all of this.

“I've been just simply trying to listen without necessarily interpreting.”