Early on in Family Meal (Riverhead Books, 2023), the new novel by the American columnist and fiction writer Bryan Washington, one character says to another, “You finally look like a baker.” It’s a description that readers of his previous fiction might recognize—an echo of the character in the opening story of his 2019 collection, Lot, who looks “like a snow globe, or a baker’s son,” or the guy in his 2020 novel Memorial who’s “built like a baker.”
This time around, though, that character actually is a baker: TJ, the son of a Korean immigrant father and a Black mother who owns the bakery where he works. Though TJ is one of a few of the book’s narrators, his role as a preparer of food is a pivotal theme of Family Meal. Its title refers to the meal a restaurant staff typically eats together before service, and while there’s no actual family meal in this book—the bakery closes by 3:00 p.m. each day—people still come together in communion. Food in Family Meal is how characters show their love for one another; it anchors the commercial enterprises that offer them a foothold in a rapidly gentrifying Houston; it ties them to their past in ways both treasured and complicated.
Washington—who also writes the Eat column for the New York Times—has always shined when describing cooking and eating. His catalogues of food, in particular, inform who these characters are and where they are coming from. TJ, remembering the road trip food his parents would pack, describes “kimbap and ham sandwiches and Tupperwares of kimchi and burritos from the taquería behind our house.”
These are familiar pleasures. On the surface, Family Meal at times feels like a reworking of a well-known recipe, drawn from a pantry of ingredients Washington has used in previous works. We’re once again mostly in the neighborhoods of Houston, with return trips to places both near (Galveston) and far (Osaka). Photographs punctuate the prose, as they did in Memorial. Characters navigate issues of body image and the complexities that come with being HIV-positive. But for all the similarities, Washington is working with a new flavor in Family Meal: grief, its bittersweetness suffused through the pages of the novel.
This is especially true in the first half of the story, where Cam, our first-person narrator who has long been grappling with the loss of his parents in a car crash, is now reeling from the recent death of his boyfriend Kai. He’s come back home to Houston, accepting a job tending bar and a place to live from an old friend of Kai’s. But mostly he’s doing whatever he can to numb his grief, working the hookup apps at a manic pace, fueled by whatever pills and powders he can score. And he knows that whatever release he finds is temporary and unsustainable.
“At some point after his death,” Cam tells the reader about the frenetic pace of his hookups, “here and there became everywhere, all the time, and naming a thing doesn’t prevent you from succumbing to it.”
Cam is literally haunted by the ghost of Kai, who’s fond of flicking water at his neck while he cooks at home after his shift at the bar. He’s tormented by dreams of different deaths for Kai, all of which elide the actual story of his killing, the specific, agonizing details of which are withheld from the reader until halfway through the story. Cam’s memories of him are all filtered now through his knowledge of that event, turning him cynical.
In one scene, Cam recounts a memory of baking biscuits for Kai, who comforts him when the dough comes out a shady color. “They didn’t exist before,” Kai says, “and you made something from nothing with your own hands. . . . That’s a beautiful thing.” Once a touching memory, Cam is now wary of any romantic keepsakes of cooking, or anything else. “Lately, that memory’s lost its sheen,” he says. “We were two fags in an apartment chewing a pair of burnt biscuits.”
Against this backdrop, TJ comes by the bar where Cam works. The two haven’t seen one another in a decade; TJ’s family took Cam in after his parents died, but things between the two of them are awkward and edgy and uncertain. Here again, food is put to diplomatic use: reconciliation. TJ offers Cam a paper sack of flaky and warm chicken turnovers, pastries as peace offering and nostalgia trip and something like an apology. They are the same turnovers that Cam once cooked for Kai as a token of his love. But among the other ravages of grief is Cam’s now-precarious relationship with food—he spits out his bite as soon as TJ goes away, then throws out the rest of the sack. Whatever hopes of rebonding TJ might have had, Cam isn’t in a place to accept it.
Cam’s narrative voice is more spare than others who have told the stories in his previous work, the lines short and staccato. Some chapters are only a sentence or two, surrounded on the page by a roar of white space: “And then, obviously, he died,” reads one. You get the sense that Cam is withholding as much as possible while he tells his story, trying to keep the world at bay. And when the dam finally bursts, in a single, bravura pages-long sentence near the end of his section, the sensation isn’t relief—it’s chaos, and the terror that comes with it.
The second half of the novel shifts to TJ’s perspective and at times struggles to match the propulsion of the beginning of the story. This isn’t so much a question of the prose—TJ’s voice and Cam’s are similar, the way you’d expect from guys who grew up together. But the stakes feel lower; survival is no longer the question the way it is with Cam. The characters are kinder and more understanding of one another. Everyone is fundamentally decent, or at least trying their best. There are still pleasures to be had, a testament to Washington’s ability as a stylist and storyteller. And if TJ’s section leans a little more sentimental, it’s because he’s rooting for Cam.
Some of the loveliest writing in the novel belong to the short sections woven throughout that belong to Kai, a Black man from rural Louisiana who leaves home to become a translator of Japanese literature of every kind, from fiction to repair manuals. The brief paragraphs of his section thrum with meaning; discussing his work translating a Japanese novelist, Kai says, “Hana told me that she’d hated her mother, but she still kept all of the woman’s pottery in her apartment. When I asked why, Hana said, Because it’s beautiful.” In these chapters, Washington puts a finer undercurrents of the book: what does it mean to move on from something, somewhere, someone, and where does one go? It’s a credit to the novel that the story resists easy answers and instead explores the repercussions of choices its characters make.
Questions of moving on apply as well to Washington. Reading a new book by an admired writer offers the chance to recapture the familiar pleasures of their previous work—the equivalent of ordering your favorite dish at a restaurant again, comparing it to the version that only lives in your memory. Family Meal, Washington’s third book of fiction in five years, certainly offers that, but at times I found myself wondering what new themes, settings, cuisines so to speak, he might try next.
