While we now use it to mean a fuss or convoluted mess, the origins of the word palaver, the title of Bryan Washington’s third novel, lie in the Portuguese term palavra, which simply means “word”. Over time, and possibly coloured by the historical context of Portuguese colonists’ rampages across the globe, “palaver” came to refer to a complex debate or negotiation between two culturally distinct parties.
Culture clashes, conflicted conversations, oppositions and exchanges are principal interests for Washington. His debut novel, 2020’s Memorial, was a sobering but sensitive consideration of a fracturing interracial gay relationship set between Houston and Osaka. This was followed in 2023 by Family Meal, again taking place in Houston, with its pithy observations of a combustible queer love triangle. Palaver centres on the tense relationship between protagonists “the son” and “the mother”. Guarded and prickly, the son is an American who has lived in Tokyo for the best part of a decade, teaching English as a foreign language. Throughout this period, he’s been estranged from his Jamaican-American mother back home in Texas. The novel opens with the equally crabby mother unexpectedly turning up on her son’s doorstep, and mostly covers the week and a half they spend together, moving between their two perspectives. Illuminated by Tokyo’s harsh neon, mother and son edge around reckonings with their bitter past of familial dysfunction, and make their way towards something resembling rapprochement.
Conversation between the two often seems impossible. The son reverts to the body language of adolescent discontent: he is endlessly groaning, grimacing or rolling his eyes. While these gestures might signal a metaphorical evasion of connection, he avoids his mother more literally too. Instead of showing her the delights of his adopted home town, he continues his usual routine of drinking a little too much with his rather fabulous crew of extremely funny and silly gay pals, going on questionable Grindr hookups and coasting through relationships with unavailable men.
Meanwhile, the mother – an inquisitive and self-sufficient character – becomes a flaneuse. She wanders through Tokyo from the son’s apartment to the shops, “past the hot pot diners, and then the cluster of tiny alleys where teens flipped skateboards, filming TikToks, and then the trio of shawarma stalls whose lines spilled into the intersections; past the bundled buildings advertising hostess bars and international phone plans, toward the tunnel covering huddles of men smoking cigarettes, drinking from Sapporo cans on the overpass alongside Ōkubo Station”. Her confidence at navigating the city’s spaces develops in tandem with her boldness in persuading her son to share more of his life with her and to see her humanity.
Alongside this present-day narrative, there are flashbacks to the mother’s childhood in the Caribbean, where we discover that her hostility and homophobia have a complex and affecting genesis concerning her charismatic brother, Stefan. Then there are recollections of the mother’s emigration to Toronto. There is also a storyline about the son’s brother, Chris, who has spent time in prison. Interspersed amid all this are photos that capture Tokyo’s streetlife, nightlife and Japanese domesticity. All this variety can make proceedings feel as wandering as one of the mother’s undirected strolls. The structure reflects the theme of powerlessness: “the mother couldn’t help but wonder how little control she had over her life, and how little say everyone has in where they end up”. In the same way both mother and son believe they have been thrown off course by often cruel winds of circumstance, so the novel cannot follow a straightforwardly linear path.
The determined sparsity and downbeat mode of the narration – signatures of Washington’s oeuvre now – mean that, largely, these scattered fragments come together to form a sensible whole. The narrative is glued together by the themes of alienation, exile and the challenges of creating and sustaining a sense of home.
Arguably, there is something colourless and trite about the novel’s ultimate – and seemingly inevitable – move towards mutual understanding between the two lead characters. And throughout, as in Family Meal, there is a tendency towards a kind of faux-insightful Insta-therapy speak in the dialogue that does a disservice to the alluring strangeness and open-endedness of characterisation elsewhere. At one point, an elder mentor figure gives the son the weighty life advice that he needs to “show up for himself”.
But fans of Washington’s work will have much to enjoy here. All the staples of his style are on show: the mumblecore prose, the interest in Asian culture and particularly cuisine, messy gay bars, a chosen family of smart aleck and ludic queer sidekicks, frank presentations of sex and sexuality, unwanted guests and unlikely alliances, tricky mothers and harrumphing sons. This, however, was the principal problem for me: I felt that, in Palaver, I was reading a remix of Washington’s greatest hits. Undoubtedly Washington is a fine, stylish and very talented writer. But I am itching for him to turn his sharp eye to new material and questions. In the middle of the novel, the mother remembers her brother nudging her to leave Jamaica, to spread her wings. “You know what life is here … go see what it is elsewhere.” Pertinent advice indeed.
