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“Houston is molting. The city sheds all over the concrete”, writes Bryan Washington in his award-winning story collection, Lot, an exploration of one of America’s most fascinating metropolises and the characters that inhabit it. Around half of the stories in the collection are told from the perspective of Nicolás, a half black half Latino boy coming of age and working in his parents restaurant in Houston. Nic is coming to terms with his identity and discovering his sexuality while dealing with a myriad of issues at home. His father abandons their family for another woman, while his mother struggles to cope, and Nic gets into fights with his mostly absent older sister and his homophobic older brother. Washington patiently draws out the story of Nic’s coming of age across the collection, in a deeply fascinating and poetic character arc.
The other half of the collection is set in neighborhoods throughout Houston, mostly in economically depressed areas where gentrification has pushed Houston’s original residents to the margins of their own communities. Washington writes about these gritty neighborhoods with stunning clarity, a cacophony of sound, smells, and tastes that permeate the collection. In the story, “Alief”, about an apartment complex torn asunder by one married woman’s affair with her white neighbor, Washington writes, “Their apartments sat stacked, one on top of the other. When James left Aja’s, he took a right toward the staircase, passing four doors, three windows and the kids … stroking the fútbol, along with their mothers watching them kick it; and the Guadalajarans on the railing, who leaned, sipping their 40s, reminiscing about adolescence, all lies, mostly; and then there were the delinquents skipping school, smoking cigarettes, nodding along to Joy Division, Ice Cube and sometimes Selena.”
The stories are populated by characters from all walks of life: whether it be a ragtag baseball team, a group of gay sex workers, drug-dealing youth, black and Hispanic restaurant workers, and so on. What unites these characters is their landscape, their gritty realities that have shaped them into complicated and nuanced characters, often forced to make difficult choices with the goal of survival. But Lot is also about home: what it means to call a place home, what it means to find a home (both physically and emotionally), and what it means to come from a broken home. Many of these characters are struggling with being torn from their homes. Washington writes of Houston post-Hurricane Harvey, “if you couldn’t afford to rebuild, then you had to go. If you broke the bank rebuilding, then you couldn’t stay. If you couldn’t afford to leave, and you couldn’t afford to fix your life, then what you had to do was watch the neighborhood grow further away from you.”
The real beauty of the collection is the ways in which the sensitively wrought characters interact with the perfectly conjured landscape. Washington renders his characters without judgement, and even as many of them struggle with connection or hurt the people around them, he points out how their landscape has hardened them and made them weary. Nicolás is an unforgettable character, but equally compelling are the family members that surround him. Particularly his mother, whose family crumbles around her, eroding her sense of security and safety. There is a real sense in this collection that characters are formed by their environment, wrought by their neighborhood’s animus. Washington has penned a cinematic and expertly imagined debut, one that feels apropos of a more seasoned writer. There is so much talent squeezed into the pages, and so much promise of gorgeous writing to come.
Further Reading: Washington’s debut novel, Memorial, will be out this October. If you enjoyed the coming-of-age queer narrative and atmospheric writing, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is very strong as well. (Read my review here).