Pandya creates characters that you want to root for - the story is clever and I love that it takes place over the course of just one week

I related with this book much more than I was expecting to. We learn about Raj, an anthropology professor, a child of immigrants, and a member of the highly elite Tennis Club in a posh neighborhood of California. He is a man who uses humor to deflect and to get out of awkward situations, but more often than not, his lack of filter gets him into trouble.

This book tells the story of one particularly unfortunate week, where Raj's seemingly innocuous blunders get him into trouble, in multiple facets of his life. With recent events, more and more conversations are being had about race relations and racism, a much-needed change from the silence that pervaded this country. However, it appears that in certain situations, this has been overcorrected, veering into the other extreme of hypersensitivity and excessive political correctness. People who may make a mistake in their comments are being obliterated, particularly in the online sphere where words often have no consequences.

These topics are extremely difficult to handle well, but Pandya does an impressive job of adding nuance and human emotions to the issue of race. He discerns the different types of racial tension that exist, dispelling the belief that all prejudice is treated the same. This book invokes empathy, understanding, and eradicating the societal barriers that cause separation and misguided assumptions.

When an extremely successful Black couple apply for membership at an elite, basically White tennis club, Raj accidentally uses the n-word in a joke. This sets off a downward spiral of misfortunes, as some tennis club members call for his removal from the board, and Raj reflects on the many, many instances of racism he's faced as the only Indian in the club. Meanwhile, he separately elicits the fury of conservative White Christian students at the college where he's an anthropology professor.

This one reminds me of Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu - not at all in writing style, but in the sense that the book grapples with how Asians relate to Whites & Blacks in America, at the expense of the story. The climax and ending to this week from hell is quite ridiculous, but even though the monologues are unrealistic and (in my personal opinion) the protagonist is unlikeable, Pandya makes very good points throughout the book.

I am a member of the American Library Association Reading List Award Committee. This title was suggested for the 2021 list. It was not nominated for the award. The complete list of winners and shortlisted titles is at <a href="https://rusaupdate.org/2021/02/2021-reading-list-years-best-in-genre-fiction-for-adult-readers/">

I loved this book--the tension was something you felt throughout the whole telling of the story. Racism is such a "trendy" topic these days; this story was well-told, with characters who were well-developed and clearly either likeable or not.

Thoughts below but all in all, I thought this book was excellent and realistically depicts how microaggressions (nothing "micro" about microaggressions -- it's still racism with a capital 'R') can really chip at a person. It's effin annoying that we face these everyday but we don't call it out but sweep it under the rug because it's "minor feelings" (see Cathy Park Hong).
-I feel like this book is super relevant esp with the rise of white supremacist factions on university campuses raging on "liberal" educators and ideas
-I really love that Pandya's character distinguished the difference btwn being critical of America's racism and being anti-American/Christian/white
-Pandya does an outstanding job building the tension all the way until the end of the book... it was hella annoying to see Raj hemming & hawing but the last two chapters made it all worth it
-I appreciated the glimpse into the pressures of academia, the insecurities that arise for professors/lecturers esp published vs non-published, as well as the power dynamics within a department
-I also appreciated Pandya drawing us into the narrative and putting us in Raj's shoes in which he felt threatened enough to purchase a firearm -- I have always been strongly against personal gun ownership and never understood the appeal of it, but Pandya does a good job conveying both the fear of anonymous threats and the lack of trust in law enforcement.

This story is very relevant in today's world where the issues of race and racism are rarely out of the headlines in many countries around the world. The lead character is a person of color discovering what it feels like to be classified by the color of your skin. The author uses the setting of the tennis club to discuss issues of membership that extend to society in general.

Well written and very topical. Well worth reading.

This book steps into some issues that are going on in the country, with race relations, cancel culture, freedom of speech, and yet it doesn’t dive very deeply. The book takes, mostly, one horrible week, for the main character Raj Bhatt, Sunday through Friday, with an extra chapter for the aftermath. First problem arose due to a horrible joke at his tennis club, and it grows from there. It really is the worst week anyone can imagine.

We get many details of Raj’s life, mostly in the present, also some from his past. They do fill in fully about Raj, and what I mostly found was that Raj isn’t honest, with anyone. He constantly tells little lies. At the end, I was left with the feeling that Raj is never fully truthful to anyone in his life, and question if he was even to himself. So while the book was decent it fell a little flat for me.

This adult contemporary spans over a week of tension and horror that starts by Raj, an Indian-American, saying something racist during an interview being conducted by a Black family and meant to include him in a Tennis Club that's too white. There's a satirical undertone around the prevalent socio-political climate as well as social media's humongous effect on something done wrong, including the unwarranted responses to something posted after picking the most controversial bits, like one of Raj's philosophy lecture where he criticised America. It's a story that brings a relatable character to the pages in the way he's kind and good at heart but does make mistakes that are too high on the bar for some on social media and offended whites.

I'm kicking myself for not reading this book sooner! It's a timely read, and gives a story about race and class that's different from the most common ones we hear about in the news. I was engaged from start to finish, constantly amazed by the turns in the story and wondering where it would end up.

Our narrator is Raj, an Indian-American college professor and father of two boys with his white wife. Raj is having a rough week. On Sunday evening, he makes a dumb joke without thinking while interviewing a black couple who have applied to join his predominately white tennis club. The next day, his lecture is recorded by a student and published online which leads to him being accused as being reverse racist by a group of extremely conservative students. These two events each snowball on their own, causing Raj to face a lot of ugly truth about his life he'd been happily ignoring for years.

I liked Raj from the start. He's a genuinely nice guy, trying to do his best. He's never felt like he fit in wherever he's lived, and he's just looking for a sense of community. The writing is sharp and funny inn a dark way. I appreciated having a glimpse into the mind and life of this character I don't have much in common with and could never imagine what his life is life. I have a little bit of an idea now what it might be like to always feel like an outsider because of your skin color or religion.

This is an important read, now more than ever. It demonstrates that things aren't always as straightforward as they seem. I highly recommend it for readers of literary fiction and current affairs.

This book was definitely relatable and the writing was humorous and very believable. Raj is stuck between black and white America and the book explores how he navigates society. I found myself getting frustrated at Raj for his racism but also found myself getting annoyed at the idea of racism against white people. Definitely a thought-provoking read!

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

From the beginning of this book, even from the synopsis, I knew I would feel embarrassed by what was going to happen to Raj, the narrator. I was right.

Raj, on a Sunday evening, makes a terrible racist joke, and it will be the start of one of the worst weeks of his life. From ordinary racism to debasement, from silent judgemental stares to insults, the situation will escalate until it can't anymore.

I felt embarrassment when the joke happens. I can totally understand why Raj wants to melt, to disappear, or to go back in time to unsay it. And I also get his awkwardness, his need to connect, and his failing to do so. I ached for him, and it got worse. As I was progressing, I felt indignation. Raj lives in the United States since he is 8, he is a university professor now, studying anthropology, he goes to a TC and still, people are belittling him, ignoring him, or even straight up insulting him, making him feel like he doesn’t belong. Because he is brown and born in another country. He feels different and he feels like he is used sometimes to prove that there is diversity in a place, like the TC or university. He is wondering if what he feels is real or just him being paranoid; as we progress in the book, we know it’s real.

The worst, maybe, is that he gets attacked for two different reasons, both involving a form of racism. And Raj’s life goes down really quickly: in a matter of days, nothing feels the same. Cyberviolence is portrayed here: how people don’t realise how hurtful they can be, how easy it is for them to trash someone who’s not in front of them - or someone they don’t even know in person! -, to use offensive words and to threat someone’s career, even his very life. And how people looooooooove to speak about subjects they know nothing about, be they general or personal to people around them. Infuriating.

I loved this book for bringing this talk to the forefront. I also loved being in Raj’s head and him explaining what he feels, how he feels, and why he is in such a situation. He gives us snippets of his past, of what he lived through, of how he got where he is now, of the envy he feels sometimes when he sees white people being idiots or less deserving succeeding when he stagnates or gets thrown back because of his skin colour - there was an infuriating scene in which Raj explains why he was fired from his previous workplace. Plus, I also loved that he is a teacher!

I really loved the ending, even if I would have liked something to happen at the very end.

While reading this book, I wanted to shake people and to open their eyes wide, let them see all the problematic things they’re doing, seeing, listening to without reacting. Hope it has the same effect on every reader.

Rarely do I sink into a novel like I did this one. Raj is a professor born in India, but raised largely i the States. He has settled in to a nice life with his wife and two sons. They even belong to a country club. But Raj's struggle to figure out just who he is in the world results in an unintended racial slur to a couple looking to join the club. We then see the next week in his life unfold in some dramatic ways.

I really liked Sameer Pandya's writing style. It's easy to visualize the characters, settings and situations. I can't wait to see what's next from this author.

This is a novel for our times. It deals with racism, yes, but in a much more nuanced and thoughtful way than many other novels that deal with this theme. There are many shades of racism and they're not all directed against black people or directed by white people. There are also intersections between racism, classism, gender, and more such socio-cultural constructs within our world today. As we see how entire worlds can be turned upside down in a week, we are also brought face to face with our own unconscious biases about all of those latter constructs. The writer has ensured that the narrative never gets didactic or message-y, which is no easy feat given the subject matter. A must-read.

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on July 7, 2020

Some Americans rather vocally condemn anyone who has a higher education as elitist. Pursuing an education beyond high school doesn’t make anyone elite — two-thirds of Americans have taken college courses and nearly a third have a bachelor’s degree — but it does give people tools for exploring new ideas that, without a higher education, they might not easily find. A key scene in Members Only suggests that colleges and universities have value for students and faculty who are “interested in ideas and new ways of thinking.” Perhaps those who deride higher education as elitist feel threatened by new ideas, or change of any sort.

The protagonist of Members Only, Raj Bhatt, lectures in anthropology at a small university. While educational institutions are sometimes criticized for being too politically correct, particularly when students protest faculty members who are perceived as teaching from a racist perspective, Raj finds himself under the microscope when a student records out of context a portion of a lecture “on the history of Indian men who had come to America starting in the nineteenth century and sold religion and spirituality to the masses,” Deepak Chopra and yoga practitioners among them. Raj asks whether Americans became obsessed with eastern religions because they offered an alternative to “our own sense of loss and emptiness,” a “counterpoint to the emptiness of Christianity and western life.” This is pretty tame stuff by ordinary academic standards, but a group of conservative students, rather than debating the point with him, call for his ouster on the theory that he attacked their religious and cultural (western) beliefs.

Raj’s lecture has evolved over the years, driven in part by his own perspective as someone who is caught between two cultures. His parents moved to California from Bombay in the hope of giving Raj a better life. Raj understands that his material life is better than it would have been in India, but there is more to life than money. In high school, he never felt entirely accepted by white or black students. That sense of being apart, of living on an island of his own, has always been a part of his existence.

Members Only is about belonging, being a member of something larger than oneself, being part not just of an insular family but of the human family. The novel addresses that theme from the perspective of a man with brown skin who never feels entirely welcome or understood when he is away from home. It does so in the context of the academic community and the tennis club to which Raj belongs.

The story takes place over the course of a bad week in Raj’s life. He receives news of two health problems, one that might develop over time and another that appears suddenly. Raj is on the membership committee of his tennis club and is happy that another member has invited a black surgeon to apply. During the membership interview, Raj — hoping to create a bond with the applicant — makes a joke that is in poor taste and that some white members of the committee view as racist. Raj agrees that he needs to apologize to the surgeon, but balks at their insistence that he apologize to the other members of the committee, all of whom are white. They have never apologized to him, after all, for making him feel apart in a hundred different ways.

The notion of white people who feel victimized carries through to the conflict with students in Raj’s class who want Raj to be fired for attacking America and Christianity. The university suggests, in a roundabout way, that Raj might want to apologize to the students for advancing ideas that some of them find offensive. Understandably, Raj does not appreciate that suggestion, but he does not handle encounters with some of the more strident students as well as he might. He also deals with a troubled Indian student with less sensitivity than would be ideal. A video of his mild meltdown, doctored to make it seem worse, goes viral on right wing websites as proof that liberal college instructors are indoctrinating students with anti-Christian and anti-American beliefs.

While Members Only addresses timely questions of race and culture, it also makes clear that Raj, as a human being, struggles with all the issues that are common to humans of all colors. He and his wife are raising two sons, one of whom has behavioral difficulties that his teachers find concerning. Worries about his children only add to his mounting stress.

Notwithstanding its subject matter, Members Only avoids becoming a polemic. Sameer Pandya takes time to develop Raj as a person. His nationality is an obvious part of his identity, but he is also defined by successes and failures — as an academic, as a father and son — that stand apart from his skin color. The care Pandya takes in showing the reader all facets of Raj’s personality makes it easier to understand Raj's struggle with belonging in the larger context of a universal struggle to make the best life we can.

During the first third of Members Only, I wondered whether Pandya would simply recycle familiar themes about the hardships faced by people of color. By the end, I was captivated, not just by Pandya’s ability to address those themes in new and insightful ways, but by Raj as a unique human being who learns something about his life during a difficult week. Without moralizing, Members Only has something valuable to say about serious issues of race of ethnicity, but it does so by telling a story that invites emotional bonding with a troubled but likeable protagonist.

RECOMMENDED

Raj Bhatt is one cringy guy. Born in India, he moved to the US as a child and we meet him in the present where he is a professor of anthropology in a California university, married to a white woman, and a father to two young boys. He enjoys playing tennis at the Tennis Club (TC), a club to which his wife and her family have been members for ages. The book opens as several members, including Raj, interview prospective members. During this process, a Black couple is introduced, and an incredibly uncomfortable moment involving a racial slur sets off a cascade of events that, though unrelated, all have Raj in the center. The novel could have easily focused on the controversy and taken on a purely political bent. Or, it could have zeroed in on all the awkwardness embodied by Raj. Instead, Pandya masterfully weaves all of it together and adds a layer of BIPOC insight that I have rarely seen written. My biggest critique would be that the ending felt rushed and tidied up too much, and that the character of Richard never fully comes to life, but the nuanced way in which Raj's innermost thoughts are expressed makes this a great read. It subtly brings up inter-BIPOC issues/racism with an in-your-face faux pas, but also brings up the issue of what it means to so desperately want to see and be among those that are like you, or at least a little similar to you. In Raj's case, it's the idea of having other non-white members in the TC that leads him to over-identify with them and in the process, make a huge mistake. His yearning for communion with other darker-skinned people is so immense that he in fact does the very thing that will likely ensure that they NOT have a good relationship. Like I said, it's cringy and awkward, and yet relatable for those of us who have been in similar situations of yearning (though without the racial slurs). In any case, the story brings up a lot of good points about our racial and class climate and it's all packaged into a highly relatable novel.

"Members Only" was an interesting novel about race and social class in America. Even though I enjoyed the plot, I felt the writing was a little lackluster and meandering. This book was 50 pages too long. Some of the secondary characters were irritating and unrealistic. I do feel the tone of this book was dead-on when it comes the underlying themes of race and discrimination. Solid novel but lacked punch and intention.

Release date: July 7, 2020

What a phenomenal debut novel from Sameer Pandya! I was captivated from the very first page and found myself lost in Raj's week from hell. I absolutely loved how Pandya explored the idea of never belonging through the eyes of an Indian American character. I'm Indian American myself, and it was really powerful to read this narrative around Raj's insecurities and desires. I absolutely loved the part near the end where he told everyone he isn't unhinged, that in fact this is the most clear he's felt about things. LOVED that! Great work and look forward to more for Pandya.

“We did not sacrifice quality in getting them here.”
Yes!! That captures the unconscious systemic racism that we should all be confronting these days. That sentence jumped off the page at me. This book did a great job of handling the issue in a way that managed to also entertain and captivate.
Several moments/relationships struck me: the interracial marriage and how the White member can never really completely get it (been there); the final meeting in the tennis club where the sentence above came out and Raj’s “speech”; the odd stalker-student; and perhaps my favorite moment, the school art show and the rise of Ganesh....just a few highlights among many.
I loved this book.

A brown lecturer finds himself entangled in a web of racial issues over an ill-informed choice of an unintentional slur tossed by him at a black man in a posh tennis club. Accused of reverse racism by white folks in his club, Raj in Sameer Pandya's Members Only is baffled at the casual racism he had to endure otherwise and miffed at the righteousness of his club-member acquaintances. To top it, a seemingly innocuous observation about the colonial roots of anthropology gets him in trouble at his work where students with right-leaning parents have found a newfound purpose aided by the cancel culture of our times. Can Raj weather this storm? Astutely observed and thoughtfully narrated, Members Only is a contemplation of racial issues from a brown man's perspective whose access to white spaces is as fragile as it is charged by racial politics. Pandya's prose is simple yet loaded with righteous anger that helps the book's pace. Told linearly the book's meandering and often uneventful narrative sometimes runs the risk of working against its flow but that's only a minor quibble in the otherwise interesting read.