Family Meal is Texas author Bryan Washington’s second novel, following a book of short stories and a well-reviewed debut novel, Memorial, exploring the end of an interracial gay love affair, a parent’s death and one character’s search for his roots.
Here, Washington takes up similar themes. Family Meal is set mainly in Houston, Texas, where the central character, Cam, is living a dissolute life of extreme drug-taking, self-starvation and compulsive, anonymous sex after the death of his partner, Kai. A childhood companion, TJ, comes back into his world, nursing complicated feelings about him and about the past. Dead and distant family abound: Cam’s parents died in a car crash, while TJ’s Korean father, Jin, also died and Kai was estranged from his parents.
The novel is sparely narrated by these main characters in turn – Kai from beyond the grave – but all three are equally resentful, guilty and miserable. I did appreciate the story’s normalisation of racial, sexual and cultural variety, its celebration of friendship and some barbed comments about gentrification in Houston, “a hodgepodge of estates, alongside a bunch of half-built condos, and evergreens, and the occasional upper-class assemblage of curated flowers planted by homeowners who’d scarfed up property before the housing loophole closed”.
For the most part, though, Family Meal feels like a wan echo of Washington’s debut, with its dead parents, mixed east Asian and Black heritage and diverse minor characters, the motif of food as an emotional expression, and its unconventional domestic setups and constant touchiness.
It’s a low-energy love triangle that crosses between the dead and the living, friendship and romantic love, sexual and familiar bonds, but there’s little warmth and huge amounts of unhappy recrimination. There are also occasional jaw-dropping levels of cringe, for this reader at least. Here’s the author’s note before the novel starts: “If you’re dealing with mental health struggles or body dysmorphia, this novel may be taxing for you. So please be kind to yourself. And go at your own pace. There’s no wrong way to be, and the only right way is the way that you are… Thanks for reading. Really.”
Family Meal proceeds, just like life, with its characters muddling along, handling their guilt, pain, anger and grief without the advantages of wit, charisma or articulacy, or the diversion of dramatic events. Overall, Family Meal serves up too little for too long.
• Family Meal by Bryan Washington is published by Atlantic (£17.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
