Bryan Washington’s “Family Meal” Is Like Fondly Flipping Through an Album of Old Family Photos https://ift.tt/vgLScqk
Bryan Washington’s newest novel, Family Meal, begins with an accidental reunion. Cam, having just moved back to Houston and now working at a gay bar, sees his childhood friend TJ drinking water at one of the tables late into the evening. Cam is looking at TJ drinking his water, and suddenly, TJ looks right at him. It isn’t a joyful moment. It’s fraught and tense. It feels like they haven’t seen each other in a long time because of many unspoken things.
Cam and TJ’s reunion jumpstarts a novel about the relationships that last through thick and thin. With its stark, striking prose and dry humor, Family Meal had me fascinated with all that is spoken and unspoken between its incredibly broken-yet-lovable pair of longtime friends and sometimes lovers, as well as its captivating, often painful ruminations on losing a loved one and being part of an ever-changing, ever-forgiving community of people.
The novel is broken into distinct halves with changing perspectives and is set mostly in modern day, post-pandemic Houston. The city plays the biggest role in terms of setting, as Washington places both Cam and TJ from Montrose to The Heights, highlighting the bustling nature of the city, all the while showing how much things have changed for the two of them.
For Cam, it seems that he never expected to be back in Houston. The novel starts with his perspective, fresh from Los Angeles, still reeling from the unexpected, brutal loss of his boyfriend, Kai. While he is aimless and almost always high and hooking up, he sees Houston has changed while he was away. Buildings have been bulldozed, properties are for sale, and the bar he works at is always in danger of closing down.
For TJ, he’s been a part of Houston since birth, and he is now working at his late father’s home bakery with his mom. In the latter half of the novel, he deals with the trappings of a romantic relationship with an engaged man that can only be described as “It’s Complicated,” and he is resistant to the idea of his mother taking the bakery from the home to an honest-to-God storefront, like many of the small mom and pop operations that have since left the area.
For both Cam and TJ, there’s the feeling that change is coming too quickly, however inevitable it must be. Still, some things remain the same: food, sex and love. In my reading, I always felt grounded by these things, whether it be in Washington’s very funny, all-too-real dialogue between people who have known each other way too long, in the details of one of Cam’s strangely polite hook-ups, or in a quiet memory of Cam cooking in the kitchen with Kai or TJ staying up too late with his father.
There is also a greater sense of finality and peace in the two times the novel shifts to Kai’s perspective. These brief interludes into Kai’s memories happen after each of Cam and TJ’s halves of the story, and they take us through his life from Louisiana to Los Angeles to Japan. Kai’s memories were quite emotional in their depictions of family drama and romantic love, and I was moved by the way Kai was able to add an unexpected, extra dimension to Cam and TJ’s relationship by the end of the novel.
While Cam and TJ are the true heart of the novel, I also felt myself falling in love with Family Meal’s supporting cast. The novel felt like a love letter to a vast community in the way they were portrayed – the generosity of Fern and his family in taking Cam in, the ever-present Mae who gently guides both Cam and TJ, the enigmatic Noel, who comes to the bakery and gives TJ his own start. Reading Family Meal feels like fondly flipping through an album of old family photos: joyful, painful and full of love, all at once.
FICTION Family Meal By Bryan Washington
Riverhead Books
Published October 10, 2023
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