Memorial by Bryan Washington
4/5.
“Loving a person means letting them change when they need to. And letting them go when they need to. And that doesn’t make them any less of a home. Just maybe not one for you. Or only for a season or two. But that doesn’t diminish the love. It just changes form.”
Benson and Mike are two men in a long-term relationship, living together in Houston and just trying to hold on. When Mike’s mother comes to visit from Japan for the first time in years, she brings the news that his father, who left the family when Mike was a child, is dying. Mike makes the decision to drop everything and go to Japan to be with his father, leaving his mother--and Benson--in Houston wondering where that leaves them.
If there is one thing this novel does well (and there are several) it is tell a love story that takes a complex, unflinching view of love and relationships and all they entail.
The two central characters are so well drawn; their love, and almost more importantly, their conflicts are so concrete and shaded, it’s hard to believe that this is a work of fiction and not a memoir. With Benson and Mike, Washington dramatizes a relationship in its last stages, and how love and heartbreak can still flare up. This is a story about two people coming to terms with their pasts, their own actions and mistakes, and figuring out where to go next--with or without the other.
At just under 300 pages this was a quick read. Washington’s sparse prose and even sparser dialogue makes for a work you can tear through in a matter of days, if not hours. Yet even with the easy writing and relatively short length, the middle lagged for me. Somewhere just past the halfway point I lost sight of the overarching plot and one of the characters’ point of view seemed to take precedence over the other. It didn’t ruin the reading experience for me, but it did make the last third of the story harder to get through than I expected.
The last few pages still managed to deliver all the warmth and heartbreak they promised, though, and were strangely optimistic. All in all, this was an expertly told story featuring complex, messy characters whom I found myself rooting for no matter how flawed they were. Four stars out of five.
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