Palaver is the second Bryan Washington book I have read (the first being Family Meal), and it didn’t take long for me to be reminded that Bryan Washington writes crunchy books. He pulls on feelings and relationships that make me squirm with their complexity. His books don’t feel good, per se, but they feel real, and once I get my mind right, once I accept that I am reading art, I have a hard time putting them down.
Palaver is the story of an estranged son suddenly reunited with his mother when she comes to visit Japan, where the son has lived for the last 12 years. The two circle around each other, neither sure how to penetrate their shame about being out of touch with the other for ten years, both wanting to repair but not knowing how.
Washington gives us two complete human beings in the mother and the son, each with desires and failures and wounds and hopes, and wrestles with the pain and intimacy familial relationships are uniquely positioned to engender. Flashbacks are interspersed throughout—the mother’s life in Jamaica with her brother, leaving him and her home when she was a similar age to her son when he left for Japan, flashbacks of the son’s closeted childhood, memories of his now-incarcerated older brother in Houston.
The mother and the son are unnamed throughout the novel, always referred to as “the mother,” as “the son.” I was surprised at how intimate these designations felt, particularly when the characters were separated from each other. At his favorite bar, with his friends, hooking up with a bartender, he is always referred to as “the son.” The mother, too, in her solo adventures, retained her tether. Tethered to each other, to their histories, to their relationship to their role.
This is a full book. No wasted lines, no wasted space. I fear I am not doing it justice as I think about all the elements that kept me locked in to this novel. The cat named Taro, delicious descriptions of food and city life, the reverence for found family and the gay bar scene.
What I would be remiss to exclude, though, is the photographs. Throughout the book, as a divider of sorts, there are photographs of Japan. Streets, stoops, signs, friends in a crosswalk, skylines. All taken by the author, all in black and white, all intimate and beautiful and a call into the story, to feel it more deeply. The perfect book punctuation I didn’t know I needed.
Michaela Lavelle loves people, books, and spaces where those things can come together. She is the Director of the Quechee/Wilder Libraries in Hartford and can be found playing volleyball, taking long walks, or attempting to bake without a recipe when she is not in the stacks.
