Memorial, the debut novel from Bryan Washington, begins with a fracturing that becomes the center of the book’s emotional landscape. The novel begins with Mike, a young chef living in the Third Ward in Houston with his boyfriend Benson, jetting off to Japan to be with his estranged father, who has received a fatal cancer diagnosis. Benson, jarred by Mike’s sudden departure, is also saddled with Mitsuki, Mike’s mother, herself visiting from Japan. Mike leaves Benson and Mitsuki in the tiny apartment together, and Benson attempts to navigate this new situation with his partner’s blunt and cold mother. Even before Mike’s departure, the relationship between Benson and Mike had become a bit strained, as the two struggled to move into more serious relationship territory, so the novel feels like it begins just as the instability in their relationship has come to a head.
The novel initiates with Benson’s narration, and the reader gets to know a little bit more about what the tension in the relationship was caused by, and the personal traumas that Benson is dealing with separate from the relationship. Benson is clearly a very reserved character, preferring to keep a lot to himself rather than sharing with others, a compulsion that feels inseparable from his family situation: Benson group up in Houston with an alcoholic father and a mother who ditched him and his sister to have a new family of her own when her husband’s issues became too much, while his sister also escaped the house as soon as she was old enough. Benson clearly struggles with abandonment issues stemming from the absence of stable parental influences, never mind the fact that his parent’s never seemed to accept his queer identity and threw him out of the house as a young man when he disclosed his HIV positive status to them. Similarly, Mike struggles with the abandonment of his father, who left Houston for Japan when Mike was around high school age, leaving Mitsuki and Mike to stew in the poverty that their family had struggled with throughout Mike’s entire childhood. The two men have each faced their share of hardship in terms of family dynamics, and the novel charts their painful and complicated journeys to reconcile this trauma with the effort of moving forward and finding their own path.
The divide between Mike and Benson is manifold: they struggle with issues of socioeconomic status, race, and intimacy. Mike condemns Benson’s relative privilege, growing up in a financially stable home, while Benson resents Mike’s inability to understand his situation as a queer black man. Their communication almost totally breaks down when Mike is in Japan, their texts become sparse, but strangely the two begin to bond with other people in a way that reminds them what it means to be intimate and present. Benson and Mitsuki begin cooking together in the apartment, and Benson spends more time caring for his father, while Mike finally becomes closer with his father Eiju, a complicated but witty character who enlists Mike’s help in running his bar in Osaka as he gets too sick to work. Their relationships with these periphery characters, especially the relationship between Mike and Eiju, give both men the opportunity to see what happens when an effort at connection is made.
As far as structure goes, Washington’s decisions about form is are really fascinating in this novel. The alternating first person point of view, beginning with Benson, then Mike, then back to Benson again, force the reader into their relationship dynamic in really interesting ways. Because both Mike and Benson are reserved, not always sharing everything that’s on their minds with each other, their conflict unfolds very organically for the reader. We, like Benson, are frustrated with Mike’s sparse text communication when he’s in Japan, and then, like Mike, we’re frustrated at Benson for not understanding Mike’s rationale for being with his father during this difficult time. The reader can thus immerse themselves in the relationship, and in a novel that’s all about relationships and communication, it feels so crucial to give the reader insight into these moments when communication breaks down. In the more intimate first person POV we can also get a sense of just how deep both Mike and Benson’s communication issues are, based on each of their family dynamics.
Memorial is a masterfully written debut novel that knows the power of things unsaid and unwritten, and Washington has perhaps cemented himself as one of the most powerful spare but thoughtful writers working today. The novel unravels the intergenerational trauma that these men have brought to their relationship, and exposes how hard it can be to connect, especially as queer people who have been forced to steel themselves from less than supportive loved ones and society. Washington slowly chips away at the walls that separate Mike and Benson, giving us a complicated but deeply meaningful meditation on love and relationships. Memorial is a testament to the cardinal value of persistence and presence in relationships, or as Mike puts it, “You just have to stick around. That’s enough. It has to be.”
Further Reading: Washington’s debut story collection is another beautiful monument to Houston culture (Read my full review here). 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).