PALAVER: A Novel
by Bryan Washington
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 336 pages, $28.
BRYAN WASHINGTON’S latest novel, Palaver, is a quietly powerful story about the complexities of relating to family and friends. His fourth book, it follows an unnamed mother as she unexpectedly visits her also never-named son in Tokyo, where he has lived for many years. Though their interactions are awkward and tense at first, they gradually start to rebuild their relationship. Along the way, the mother forms a friendship with a neighborhood restaurant owner and chef while the son begins to connect more deeply with his lovers and gay-bar drinking buddies.
Washington has explored complicated relationships between mothers and sons before, especially in Memorial, but this novel raises the tension considerably. The son, not having expected the mother’s visit, leaves her to her own devices most of the time, whether meeting his clients as an English teacher, getting drunk at gay bars, or hooking up. Indeed, the novel opens with the mother, while staying at the son’s tiny one-room apartment, getting lost while trying to explore the neighborhood. Fortunately, she encounters Ben, owner and chef at a nearby restaurant, who gives her a free sample of the fare.
Later, after the mother asks to go out to eat, the son takes her to a gay restaurant, where photos of naked men decorate the walls and porn plays on the TV screens. Their conversations, if one can call them that, are short and filled with the son’s resentment and the mother’s quiet defensiveness. She has come because, in a rare phone call he made to her, she sensed that the son needed her. But he wants nothing from her, angrily rebuffing her strained attempts to get closer. They travel north, to Nara, to show the mother where her son used to live, and they seem to snipe at each other less. By the trip’s end, though, the son yells at the mother for what he sees as her failures as a parent.
Flashbacks tell the mother’s story of growing up in a small town in Jamaica with her gay brother Stefan, her best friend Cheryl, and Cheryl’s boyfriend Earl. She dreams of getting out but, when the opportunity arises, she’s nervous about leaving Stefan behind. She initially moves to Canada then ends up in Houston. The descriptions of her slowly unfolding relationship with Ben are wonderful, as he shows her around Tokyo’s many cuisines and they gradually open up to each other.
Even after living many years in Tokyo and going to the same expatriate gay bar night after night, the son feels isolated. A new wrinkle in his relationship with a married man leads to the phone call that brings his mother to town, while he begins hooking up with another barfly. He drinks too much, stumbling home late at night. He remembers his childhood in Houston with his brother Chris, who had trouble with the law before joining the military. Gradually, he begins to develop real friendships with the bar owner and a small group of regulars and learns that relationships can be flexible and inclusive.
Washington, who lives in Tokyo, brings the city to life with descriptions of its trains, bars, and ethnic food; Ben and the mother get smoothies from an “American” stand. While not knowing the names of the son and mother feels strange at first, especially as all other characters have names, it soon seems natural and it becomes easy to keep track of them. Dialogue is provided without quotation marks, usually quick and casual. Black-and-white photos of Tokyo between chapters help the reader imagine this world. _________________________________________________________________
Charles Green is a writer based in Annapolis, Maryland.
