Memorial

Memorial by Bryan Washington

If I were to compare Bryan Washington’s debut novel to parts of speech, it would be to nouns and verbs rather than adjectives or adverbs. This is a novel of saying, doing, happening, driven more by plot than emotion, even though emotion (and adjectives and adverbs too, of course) all have their place as well.

Mike and Benson have been dating and living together for four years. Always stymied in the face of expressing their emotions to one another, always disempowered around the idea that they could bring change and healing to their respective, strained families rather than wait for someone else to do it, a fracture in the stasis occurs when Mike’s mother arrives from Japan to visit him—and he promptly leaves her with Benson to fly to Osaka himself, having learned that his long-estranged father is dying. Benson, who is Black and poz, ends up connecting with Mitsuko, Mike’s mother, a process which indirectly but surely contributes to him pursuing with his own family: his alcoholic father, the parents who kicked him out when they learned he was poz.

All of this—estrangement, infection, addiction, being kicked out—is heavy and emotional, but Memorial is something like a set of jet skis, bouncing and gliding over the surface even as huge, undeniable plumes of the Below fly up in wild spray all around. Change and growth occur for both main characters, but the reader never quite sees what’s going on beneath the characters’ surfaces, only the foamy trail of motion and direction through the water. And while both Mike and Benson reach some peace with their parents and families, there’s also the matter of conflict between them as a couple: are they only together out of inertia? Are they loving each other? How do they really communicate? While this novel certainly shouldn’t be taken as a referendum on all gay men’s communication patterns, I read it while also reading Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s The Freezer Door, and was struck by how well Memorial captured in fiction the fear of expressing emotion and feeling and softness that Sycamore describes in her essays about (among other things) gay male culture—as well as the use of sex, alcohol, and other diversions as a substitute for words. Mike and Benson are given no conclusion within the novel, or at least not as a couple. They’ve each reconnected with their families, however, and in a country so devastatingly committed to destroying the connections and well-being of Black and immigrant lives and communities, this is a feat in and of itself; a happy ending in a novel that is light or even bubbly without being fluff, a romance that is about family, self, and the question of being together rather than the certainty.