Originally published in print February 2021.
The couple of Bryan Washington’s Memorial have a problem: they still love each other and they both know it. This is the complication of the novel as told by Benson, whose boyfriend, Mike, flies transcontinental to his distant, ailing father and leaves Benson to host his nettlesome mother. This is Washington’s debut novel which many readers of his first short fiction collection, Lot, have been waiting for impatiently.
Memorial’s plot is strikingly contemporary and fashionably meandering. What makes this novel fly is how it deploys its modern uncertainties for dramatic effect. More impressively, it elegantly side steps traditional tropes of queer storytelling. Generally — and I am generalising — in lieu of any gender disparity, homosexual relationships are often energised in fiction by a reductive investigation of the power dynamic: who is the yin/yang, alpha/beta, top/bottom. Most of the time, this works itself into the back-and-forth sawing of a power struggle, a hyper-masculine tug-of-war. However, Washington cheerfully circumnavigates these pitfalls and finds literary treasure by doing the opposite. Mike and Benson do not want to be the powerful one in the relationship. Instead the novel’s emotional movement comes from each of them ditching responsibility to the other with the speed of a sailor tossing buckets of water from his sinking ship. To have any power is to have all of the power, the power to fix things or to end things, and when a relationship is so close to the rocks, the responsibility of steering the thing to safety is not enviable. In Memorial, Benson and Mike’s homosexuality is not used self-consciously to zest a conventional love story — being gay is actually something that privately bores them — and it is written as such. It is not obstructive or heavy in the narrative. Washington gracefully pens a novel that engages a relationship in all of its features and feelings, developing the investigation of character steadily and along so many connecting threads that one has the impression Washington is creating a chain-link fence — a fence that will either protect them, or mark the space between them. The experiences of Benson and Mike can be tragic at times, but this is because life is tragic, not love.
Two things have run amuck in the popular literary fiction of the last half-decade: complicated father figures, and good sex. Some novels, Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and Anne Enright’s Actress have obliquely related these things, this novel is one of them. The first of the novel’s love scenes, or more appropriately, scenes of sex, is on page 16. In it there are smashing chests and descriptions of “kneading dough,” but there is also, more seriously, a refreshing way of writing sex. Sometimes sexual experiences in Memorial are written to convey something, but most of the time they are not. This is a refreshing push-back against the recent trend in literary fiction to pathologise sex in the name of emotional transparency or thematic consistency. There is no attempt here to ritualise or even pathologise these moments of intimacy, they are done for the characters to feel good, for as long as they feel good.
Relationships are the locomotive of this novel and although Benson and Mike’s relationship is central, Washington also acknowledges the fundamental truth, you cannot talk comprehensively about a man without, at some stage, talking about his mother. Mothers make so much sense to their children, because they are the only people they need make see sense. Mike’s mother takes his place in his shared flat with Benson while Mike takes to his dad’s deathbed. Benson hasn’t met Mitsuko before that moment but over their time in the flat he sees she is a nice woman, a woman with fancy clothes and Japanese manners. Spouses and mothers share one definite heartbreak: you can do it all for the one you love and it can still somehow not be enough. This domestic love triangle generates the emotional energy of the novel and Washington channels it well.
As its title suggests, Memorial deals with matters of death, and by extension, matters of inheritance. There are few works of fiction that are not about death. Many of those I have read use dying or bereavement for dramatic effect, to ground the plot in a seriousness and add weight to the emotional responses of the characters. Washington does something similar here but it is done in a way that tastefully complements the many themes of masculinity and ways of living that Mike and Benson are trying not to deal with in the novel. “You’re all like your fathers”, Mike’s mother says to Benson when frying pork cutlets. This observation is true and, by virtue, difficult. Mike flies across the ocean to see his father on principle, to prove to him that they’re nothing alike, Mike wants to show he doesn’t abandon those he loves. The irony is sorely obvious. It is through dealing with this difficulty that Washington covers some relatively fresh ground. As the novel begins and develops, it appears to be taking a shot at depicting a sensible masculinity, but this is a strain of thought that becomes muddled and ultimately compromised by the flaws of the characters. What begins as an effort to break into a new sort of masculinity leads to a rediscovery of masculine sensibility. In a way, it makes sense: characters in fiction are people too, not screens for us to project our fantasies of gender onto.
The novel beautifully confuses normal things, exploring the unreality of life during a relationship and its fallout and this seems to be the mission statement of the book. It keenly addresses how your understanding of your own experiences are refracted through your partner’s judgement before they reach yours, stretching and shrinking some things like a funhouse mirror. This confusion seeps down to a structural level within the prose, dissolving boundaries and snapping syntax at sometimes odd and convoluted moments while reading. A lot of the dialogue, though spoken by the same person, is indented in a way that would usually suggest a change in speaker. It seems very modern, reading like multiple messages from the same person in an app. For the first time in some time, I was reminded that a novel is a piece of engineering, a device crafted with a structure and inlaid with devices and cycles.
Washington’s most successful feat in the novel is his careful rendering of powerlessness. Washington seeds self-doubt, confusion and alienation into the narration just as it is absorbed by Benson. Both the reader and Benson struggle for their own authoritative version of events in a fight that resembles the cautious process of peeling apart what you know from what you feel. The novel understands life and love. Washington dramatises the reality that neither one is an easy thing to be subjected to. That you don’t know why it started, what it continues for, and how it ends.
