The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Tapioca and tender sex
In this sensual novel from fiction writer and food critic Bryan Washington, the aftermath of grief brings two men together
FAMILY MEAL by Bryan Washington
320pp, Atlantic, T £15 (0844 871 1514), RRP £17.99, ebook £8.99
Like both his acclaimed short-story collection, Lot, and his novelistic debut, Memorial, Bryan Washington’s second novel is set in his home city of Houston. Family Meal is also back on thematically familiar ground: loneliness, love and the struggle for connection. But whereas Memorial honed in on one couple’s relationship, Family Meal broadens its attention to a more sprawling family unit.
Cam has been away from Texas for a while, living in Los Angeles with his partner Kai. But Kai’s unexpected death changed everything, and now Cam’s back in Houston. To the casual observer, he looks to be doing well, but really he’s mired in grief, “suffocating from the weight of myself ”. He’s working at a gay bar in Montrose, living as a lodger with his employer and the latter’s husband and child, blocking out the pain with an increasingly steady supply of pills and hook-ups.
One evening at the bar, an old friend re-enters his life: TJ, the boy next door from Cam’s childhood, his best friend, possible first love, and the brother he never had. TJ’s parents, Jin and Mae, took Cam in after his own mother and father were killed in a car crash; they’re the closest thing he has ever had to a family.
The set-up of Family Meal has all the trappings of a rom-com. A rift severed these men’s once-close relationship, but perhaps they’re older and wiser this time round? Washington’s narrative, however, is more nuanced. Emotionally raw in different ways, Cam and TJ are both vulnerable, each capable of hurting the other. What transpires is a cautious, faltering dance – their once-shared intimacies can’t be ignored, but neither can the years they spent estranged – and it’s all depicted with a quiet tenderness.
Washington is attuned to the many ways in which love can be communicated, especially in the form of food and sex. He’s also a food critic at The New York Times Magazine, and writes about the former well: the comfort of a simple tapioca pudding, milk, eggs and sugar stirred slowly on the stove; the surprising delight of a Thai curry, “creamy, sweetened with coconut milk”.
The bulk of the narration in Family Meal is split between Cam and TJ, but Kai is also given a voice from beyond the grave. That device teeters on the edge of corny, but Washington holds it in check by not letting it dominate, using it as a way into Cam’s interiority. This is a novel about the family one builds for oneself, whether constituted by kin or kith, and the voice of each and every character is an important unit. “Homes can change,” Mae tells T J: both staying and leaving them takes courage. Ultimately, what matters is whom you share these spaces with. As another character tells T J towards the end of Washington’s sensual, sometimes sad, but ultimately hopeful novel: “Sometimes the best we can do is live for each other. It’s enough. Even if it seems like it isn’t.”