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A life-affirming novel of family, mending, and how we learn to love, from the award-winning Bryan Washington. In Tokyo, the son works as an English tutor, drinking his nights away with friends at a gay bar. He’s entangled in a sexual relationship with a married man, and while he has built a chosen family in Japan, he is estranged from his family in Houston, particularly his mother, whose preference for the son’s oft-troubled homophobic brother, Chris, pushed him to leave home. Then, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, ten years since they’ve last seen each other, the mother arrives uninvited on his doorstep. Separated only by the son’s cat, Taro, the two of them bristle against each other immediately. The mother, wrestling with memories of her youth in Jamaica and her own complicated brother, works to reconcile her good intentions with her missteps. The son struggles to forgive. But as life begins to steer them in unexpected directions— the mother to a tentative friendship with a local bistro owner, and the son to cautiously getting to know a new patron of the bar—the two of them begin to see each other more clearly. Sharing meals and conversations and an eventful trip to Nara, both mother and son try the best they can to define where “home” really is—and whether they can find it even in each other. Written with understated humor and an open heart, moving through past and present and across Houston, Jamaica, and Japan, Bryan Washington’s Palaver is an intricate story of family, love, and the beauty of a life among others.
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Thank you to NetGalley and Farrah, Straus & Giroux for the ARC and the opportunity to read and review before publishing. Palaver follows the Texas-born estranged son of a Jamaican immigrant as he leaves his family behind and makes a new life for himself in Tokyo, Japan. While going through a rocky period in his relationship with a married Japanese man, his mother unexpectedly arrives in Tokyo with her own emotional baggage. The story meanders through past and present and the reader visits the mother’s childhood in Jamaica and her own family struggles, the son’s various friends and lovers in Tokyo, and the awkward but good-hearted attempts of the two to reconcile their differences and similarities into a better life for them both. I’m not sure this book really did anything for me, overall. I neither liked nor disliked it. The lack of quotation marks around the dialogue was mildly irritating, and more than that, it served to disconnect me from the scenes, as though the characters weren’t speaking in the moment and I was only reading an echo of what they said. This might work for some styles, but Washington’s prose wasn’t quite delicate enough to pull it off. There were also so many characters and scene jumps that, while I found the cast likable and interesting enough, I never knew any of them well enough to really be invested. That said, this book has atmospheric vibes that are easy to sink into, particularly for anyone who can relate to the experience of leaving home and creating a new life in a foreign place. The son’s life in Tokyo feels like a misty lingering in time and space with very little movement, and I think it will appeal to a limited, specific audience. ——— Is it queer? Yes, with gay, trans, and poly characters. Is it diverse? Yes, this features characters from all over the world. How long did it take? I spent about 5 hours reading this book.
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