Family Meal by Bryan Washington book review
The broken queer men of color at the center of Bryan Washington’s second novel, “Family Meal,” are not mired in clichéd struggles of identity, representation or political victimhood. They are written as neither symbols nor archetypes but as an achingly and beautifully etched ensemble of young Americans learning to navigate a more universal and human struggle: grief. Washington’s is not a grand novel of ideas that declares itself with showy prose or pulsating ambition. It’s told in close-ups and set in a lived-in world of gay bars, bedrooms and dinner tables across Texas, Japan and California, where care and repair for the Black and Asian men at its center take center stage.
When “Family Meal” opens, Cam has reluctantly returned to Houston, his hometown, following the death of his partner, Kai, and the destruction of the life they’d built together in Los Angeles. Hazy memories of an existence defined by love, lovemaking and cooking now haunt Cam, reflected in short, sometimes sentence-length chapters that intersperse the present proceedings. Cam is in deep pain and financial free fall at the novel’s beginning, and he turns to numbing himself with drugs, anonymous sex and disordered eating. One night he runs into a former friend named TJ at the gay bar where Cam is working to make ends meet, and as the complicated history between the pair is resurrected, the novel’s narrative of return and reconnection begins.
The homes, bars and interstate highways that form the backdrop for the story are an invitation back into the working-class and multiracial Houston that Washington brought to shimmering life in his previous books, “Lot,” a 2019 story collection that was among President Barack Obama’s annual favorites, and the 2020 novel “Memorial,” about an interracial relationship, that was optioned for television before it was even published. His overnight anointment as a new wunderkind of American letters doesn’t seem to have distracted or consumed Washington, who grew up in Houston and still resides there part-time.
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In interviews and talks over the past four years, he seems to wear the hype lightly and remains focused on quietly and deliberately writing about the fundamental dignity of queer people of color. In food columns for the New York Times and the New Yorker, he underscores his love for Japanese cuisine and “queer baking,” and in a recent review of Beyoncé’s hometown concert in Houston for Time, he described how the show served as a kind of reprieve — a tangible home for queer Texans of color in a state that doesn’t always see or love them.
In the novel, Cam’s relationship to his hometown remains decidedly fraught. The neighborhood surrounding the bar where he works is “patchworked from a hodgepodge of estates, alongside a bunch of half-built condos, and evergreens, and the occasional upper-middle-class assemblage of curated flowers planted by homeowners who’d scarfed up property before the housing loophole closed,” he explains. “It’s beautiful garbage.”
Washington is equally adept at capturing the moods and sexiness of the city’s threatened queer spaces in writing that moves with a brisk, musical clip. Cam describes the speakers in the bar blasting “a gauzy stream of pop chords, remixed beyond comprehension. Dolly and Jennifer and Whitney. They’re everyone’s cue to pack up for the night. But guys still lean on the bar top in various states of disarray — a gay bar’s weekend cast varies wildly and hourly, from the Mexican otters draped in leather, to the packs of white queers clapping off beat, to the Asian bears lathered in Gucci, to the Black twinks nodding along with the bass by the pool table.”
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Washington does not shy away from graphic and frequent portrayals of queer sex, in various and multiple iterations across racial and class lines. My own recent reading selections may have been far too chaste, but “Family Meal” is an unapologetically and surprisingly explicit novel. Hands reach into athletic shorts, knees land upon shoulders, and mouths graze skin. Washington writes without judgment or commentary about this age of on-demand and immediately accessible sex, but lurking in the distance of all the anonymity of roadside or backroom encounters is also a painful avoidance of emotion and connection. After one hookup, Cam says: “After I’m maybe a block away, I find him on the app and I block him. We’re both better off that way.” Cam’s journey to understand what is and isn’t better for him — and for others — is at the heart of “Family Meal.”
Washington is a generous and gentle writer, with a profound capacity to face the cruelty and pain of contemporary American life while simultaneously offering his characters — and readers — an expansive space for self-forgiveness, hope and nourishment.
Family Meal
By Bryan Washington
Riverhead. 320 pp. $28
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