Family Meal: A Novel
In Bryan Washington’s second novel, Family Meal, three narrators speak to us in the easy, conversational style familiar from both Washington’s debut short story collection, Lot, and his first novel, Memorial. Washington’s style reminds one of reading novels by Elizabeth Strout. These two authors are worlds apart, but both use prose that is deceptively simple, that surprises with gut-punching depth. In Family Meal, Washington makes the subtle and sly choice to tell a story of loss and displacement using multiple voices that form a kind of Greek chorus. The result is a great triumph.
It would be unique enough to tell a single story from the perspective of three characters rarely heard from in literature, but in Family Meal, Washington delivers much more. With the voices of three Black queer men (one Black and Korean) struggling to find a safe place to exist in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of Houston, Texas, Washington evinces the larger crises of an entire generation. In the same way that Brett Easton Ellis captured the voice of America’s Generation X, Bryan Washington has now become a defining voice of Generation Z and the existential crises it faces.
The novel starts with Cam’s narration of his own story. Cam’s boyfriend, Kai, has recently died (we don’t know how or why yet), and Cam is not handling it well. At the invitation of two friends who own a gay bar in Houston (Cam’s hometown), Cam returns from L.A. to work at the bar and get himself together. But Cam is spiraling out of control. He drinks excessively, doing shots behind the bar and doing every drug you can imagine. He’s also addicted to anonymous sex, resulting in an astonishing number of encounters. Cam rarely thinks of his own protection, or of the feelings of others.
Through Cam, we discover many more who inhabit his prodigiously multicultural and marginalized world, and who also struggle to cope with loss—sudden and unthinkable loss of loved ones; loss of a culture, or a neighborhood; and most insidiously and gradually, the loss of a safe space in which to exist at all. “You got your concrete and brown and that’s it,” Cam says of the harsh and inhospitable environment of Houston. Later, Cam himself, when on the road to healing, is described as “a weed in the concrete that finally found wiggle room.”
Cam’s narrative voice is compelling in its extreme nonplussed nature. Washington pulls off the feat of keeping us interested in a character who is dissociated from his own feelings. At one point TJ makes an astute observation about Cam: “He suplexes you with indifference.” I had to Google “suplex” and found that “an offensive wrestling move” was the perfect metaphor here. There is, indeed, violence and pain beneath Cam’s caustic indifference. Yet Washington gives us a window into Cam’s buried feelings that mostly slip out when he is confronted by the ghost (of sorts) of his dead boyfriend—a figure who frequently pops up unannounced, sometimes comically when Cam is having a random hook up.
The most unnerving way Cam deals with Kai’s death is by essentially starving himself. Others comment on how much weight he’s losing. Cam is the unfortunate poster child for a host of generational problems. A hallmark of Gen Z is an unprecedented level of behavioral and mental health crises. It’s reported to have the least positive outlook of all other previous generations.
Yet, this generation is also known to be one of the most idealistic, and to place great emphasis on both freedom of individual identity and building community. The story of these three characters in Family Meal is a microcosm—not only of the citizens of their city but of the entire country. “This country will kill you,” says one of the narrators. With the existential threat of global warming and a polarized political climate, this cry rings true for an entire generation.
Cooking and eating food is clearly the central metaphor in Family Meal. It is perhaps Cam’s saving grace that he learned to cook in childhood from the parents of his best friend TJ who took Cam in when his parents died. The novel is full of meals, especially cultural cuisines mixing in unusual ways. But the greater idea of the essential nature of sharing food—to nurture and keep us alive; to connect us with each other; and most poignantly, as a way to show love—is at the core of this ultimately very moving story.
After Cam’s narrative, the story is taken up by Kai, and then TJ. While Kai is less glib and snarky, he is also sparse with words. Washington has placed photographs throughout Kai’s section—set in Japan where Kai periodically worked as a literary translator. This section recalls John Berger and W. G. Sebald, who use photography to create “documentary fiction,” providing us views of the subject without commentary. With Washington’s narrators there is no embellishment. Witnessing and ways of seeing are Washington’s emphases. One character in the novel, a Japanese author, says she writes about cooking because it’s “a different way of seeing.”
The three narrative voices are not always distinct. They all use the same vernacular and curt rhythm of speech. But then the sameness begins to add to the sense one is hearing from a chorus in which no individual voice is meant to be too distinct. In Family Meal, Washington gives us the feeling we are hearing from a plural but unified community.
As with Washington’s previous works, the notable exclusion in the communities we see, are white characters. White people appear in the novel, but mostly as an encroaching and menacing force on the peripheries. Washington’s Expressionistic rendering of white people recalls Edvard Munch’s use of hovering shadows: “A shriek from the neighborhood breaks the silence between us . . . the gaggle of whitewomen cross through our yard . . . hovering in front of the sidewalk.”
White people seem to function as symbolic representations of whiteness rather than as characters. They exemplify a dehumanizing force that displaces our essential nurturance with its blind capitalist (and consequently racist) objectives. But Washington skillfully avoids any such discourse or overt commentary. He simply, skillfully, shows us.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of Washington’s writing is his masterful use of little gestures: “Mae still takes hold of my palm, feeling the center. She squeezes my fingertips.” And later, “I look at Cam, but he still won’t meet my eyes. He picks a piece of loose skin on his hand.” These keenly observed details are where Washington’s literary brilliance shines most.
In the small details, of course, is everything. Washington clearly articulates the angst facing this generation by translating his characters’ most minute behaviors; by highlighting their everyday unremarkable acts—not necessarily their words. “Everyone . . . is a translator,” says Kai at one point. Washington himself is the translator here.
Through Cam’s journey to heal, we eventually see, with simple deeds like cooking a meal for someone, how we can care for one another. “Love is a tangible thing,” says Kai. With Family Meal and its culmination of little gestures, Bryan Washington has given us a powerful narrative of a generation searching for a safe place to be—and for some wiggle room to grow.