'Members Only' offers a thoughtful look at American manners and mores

Here’s a comment made by the famed poet Robert Frost that might best explain Members Only, a tennis-themed novel published earlier this year: “I’m never more serious than when joking.”

Told with a deft touch, Members Only is fast-paced, enjoyable and often quite funny. But don’t confuse wit with lightness. With tennis as its launching pad and moral center, this book offers a thoughtful look at contemporary American manners and mores, most pointedly in how we treat and discuss such sensitive topics as race and social class.

The author, Sameer Pandya, shares much with his fictional protagonist, Raj Bhatt. Pandya is an assistant professor in the Asian American Studies department of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Raj also teaches on a California campus. Each is also Indian, came to the U.S. as a child, and loves tennis.

There is a joy Raj feels when he plays, a delightful body-mind connection, as well as to notions of beauty, and, perhaps most of all, a sense that the tennis court is a place where he can truly belong. Says Raj, “I loved the late afternoon matches when the soft winter California sun lit up the surrounding hills in orange phosphorescence.”

The plot takes its twist on a seemingly innocuous Sunday evening. Raj is on his club’s membership committee, added to it for reasons he suspects might have as much to do with politics as with tennis: “A few months before, Suzanne had asked me to be on the committee, saying that I would be ‘a perfect addition, a friendly face.’ I remember the quote because the words, and their juxtaposition, had wormed through my ears for days. What exactly was I adding? I was, indeed, quite friendly. But was my presence also a show of diversity? Did they all think I was the token who wouldn’t rock the boat?”

The committee that night meets with prospective members Bill and Valerie Brown, a Black couple. Bill reveals that he played tennis at Stanford, an instant signal of significant on-court prowess. Excited about the possibilities of Bill’s presence as both an excellent player and a fellow non-Caucasian, Raj makes an effort to be exceptionally chummy and ends up committing a racial faux pas that stuns the committee members and severely complicates Raj’s relationship to his beloved tennis community.

That same week, at the university where he teaches cultural anthropology, Raj is accused of being a reverse racist, his allegedly anti-American biases going global when students record his lectures and post them on the Internet. Rapidly, Raj is vilified, his job threatened.

As this hellacious week unfolds in ways at once clever and dramatic, we learn about Raj’s journey, from early childhood in Bombay, to growing up in Northern California, to college days, life as a scholar and instructor and his efforts to build a life as an immigrant come to America.

“Tennis helps me think about the way this protagonist feels about his own sense of insiderness and outsiderness,” Pandya told me when we spoke last week.

Arriving to the United States at the age of eight in 1980, Pandya was instantly drawn to tennis.

“I missed out on the peak Connors-McEnroe-Borg time, but really got into it during the Lendl, Edberg and Wilander years,” he says. In his youth, Pandya’s favorite players represented two poles: the passionate, artistic Yannick Noah and the hardworking, pragmatic Ivan Lendl. “I loved Lendl for his grind, his immigrant outsiderness and that one-handed backhand,” says Pandya, “and Noah for his exuberance.”

Twitter/@sameerpandya

By Pandya’s teens, his family moved to Hercules, a middle-class San Francisco suburb 15 miles north of Berkeley. Mostly, he played there on four public courts.

“On those courts, I learned that leisure is part of the way in which we live,” says Pandya. “The hard work is balanced out.”

Eventually playing number two on his team at El Cerrito High School, Pandya was also aware that there were other youngsters who availed themselves of instruction (Pandya only took his first private lesson in his 30s), competed frequently at tournaments and became junior members at prestigious clubs. If on the one hand, tennis makes the case for itself as a pure meritocracy, Pandya notes that, “the road one takes to get to that playing field is very uneven.”

While financial resources certainly play a vital role here, other factors enter the picture, including a family’s awareness of the significance of sports, a parent’s connection to others who are members of various facilities, or even a random working relationship. The social milieu continues into adulthood and how the tennis experience plays out at various facilities.

“The explicit rules are the ones about how the game is played,” says Pandya, “The implicit rules are about you play with and who you ask to play with you. Those hierarchies within the game reflect social hierarchies.”

Members Only author Sameer Pandya (Twitter/@sameerpandya)

With his life in tumult, Raj is also aware that even the sport he cherishes teems with sociological complications. Observing a doubles match between four players he’d like to play with, Raj observes that, “The TC was filled with all sorts of different, parallel, hidden social hierarchies and cliques. The old families, the new ones, the ultrarich, the ones with two working parents, the out-of-work parents who pretended they weren’t, the Christians, the liberals, and on and on. It was one large, shifting flow chart of alliances that everyone could see but no could fully map.

“But I’d always assumed that play on the court transcended this. If you were good and you weren’t an enormous dck, you got invited to the better matches. Even if you were a dck, but you had game, you still played. There were rules within the matches, but also rules on the how the matches got set up . . . But as I watched the match, and all of them pretended I wasn’t there, I questioned whether good play could take care of everything.”

And so, Members Only, a lively tale that conveys a deep set of questions about how tennis fits into a bigger contemporary American picture, addressing such complicated topics as aspiration, diversity, mobility and community. This book will make you laugh, but it will also make you think.