Things are further complicated when Mike’s mother, Mitsuko, flies to Texas to stay with them, only for Mike, one day after her arrival, to leave for Osaka to care for his estranged, dying father, whom he hasn’t seen in 16 years. Here, sex is less a form of intimacy than a mawkish groping for it. Like we were fucking away the thing that’d sat itself on our chests.” The two fight frequently and, “to clear the air,” fuck the tension away: “That became our routine whenever we fought. The novel is narrated through the divided perspectives of a gay couple: Benson, a Black daycare teacher whose job supervising children as they fight and work and play serves as a microcosm of adult life, and Mike, Japanese American and slightly older, who makes his living as a cook. The author has now followed Lot with Memorial, which is, like his previous work, partly set in Houston and follows a decaying relationship between two young men who struggle with notions of home and belonging. With Washington, there is a determination to let things speak out of their own silence, the way one might look at a photograph and envision how, after the camera turns its gaze elsewhere, the forced smiles will fall back toward their everyday pose.
Instead of offering a history of the marriage, Washington, in a few short sentences, gives the reader a portrait of its consequences. Sparsity colors the page, and one begins to imagine what left her so disheveled.
In the title story of his acclaimed 2019 collection, Lot, a mother tells her children that “love was a verb,” not some abstract feeling but “something you have to do.” The mother, recently separated from her husband, doesn’t elaborate, but the act of loving, the result of having loved and been loved, is seen clearly: “She had makeup all over her brow. The strongest sentences in Bryan Washington’s prose capture the silences beneath speech and movement.
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