Nerdette chose this book by Sameer Pandya for their book club a few months ago, and when I saw how short it was, I went ahead and requested the ebook from my library, since the audiobook appears to only be available through Audible. It’s a pretty quick read, and while it wasn’t my favorite book of the year, it was pretty solid, especially considering it’s so short and takes place over the course of just five days.
The main character, Raj Bhatt, is on the membership committee of his local private tennis club, where he’s the only brown man. He has joined the club’s membership committee in an effort to darken it, but he screws up big time when he gets a chance to interview a black couple for membership and uses the N word without thinking. He knows immediately that he screwed up, but things spiral out of control and some of the (white) members want him, not just off the committee, but to revoke his membership from the club. They also want Raj to apologize to both the Browns (the black couple) and their white sponsors, and while Raj admits he owes the Browns an apology, he refuses to acknowledge that he owes anything at all to anyone else.
That’s what I knew about the book going in, and honestly, that was the only thing that really happened in the book for a while. Despite how short this book is, it took me a while to get into it, largely because Pandya does a lot of telling rather than showing, especially in the beginning. I’m normally the one defending telling over showing, but even I have to recognize there are limits to how much an author can get away with that, and I think Pandya definitely exceeded his limit. Once we got through the beginning though, the pacing picked up considerably and I found myself much more invested in the story.
As it turns out, that horrendous interview was just the start of Raj’s week from hell. He’s a professor of archaeology at a local college and experiences some backlash from some white supremacists over part of his lecture. The allegedly offensive video was uploaded by a student who likes Raj a little too much, but made the mistake of interrogating Raj about his salary during office hours, which didn’t go over well. The student knows he messed up, but rather than apologizing, he lashes out by uploading the video to an openly racist website, at which point students start staging hunger strikes to get Raj fired. So now Raj might lose his job, his tennis club membership, and he’s getting threatening calls at his house. Oh, and he has a mole on his foot that may or may not be cancerous. And then the student who started the whole mess at school starts stalking him, including following Raj and his family to the tennis club.
All the stress culminates in a heart attack, and who should be the attending cardiologist but Dr. Brown. His is the first face Raj sees when he wakes up, at which point Raj finally apologizes for his big mouth. The two bond and bury the hatchet, but honestly I couldn’t believe it took a heart attack for Raj to make things right. He started to go see Dr. Brown earlier in the week, but chickened out. He kept saying he would email him, but never did, and all I could think was, “Don’t you know that the longer you wait, the worse this is going to be for you?”
Raj ends up keeping his job and even getting started on that book he’s been meaning to write that will help boost his career. He does not get his tennis club membership revoked, but he no longer feels comfortable there. Although he has not yet discussed it with his wife, they’ll probably be leaving of their own accord. Which is too bad because it seemed like playing tennis and swimming in the club’s pool were the only regular exercise he was getting, which could help protect him from another heart attack. Maybe he’ll get a gym membership or something.