MEMORIAL (Book Review)

By Bryan Washington

(Riverhead Books, 2020)

This is the story of two young gay men, one Black, one Japanese, living together in Houston. They’ve been in a relationship for a couple of years and their future is uncertain. Going forward may be the easier option, but is it the right one?

 

Time doesn’t stand still to allow people to stop and assess a situation. In most cases, there isn’t even the space to permit two people to step into a bubble to talk things through, uninterrupted. There always seems to be other matters and other people to attend to. That is no different for Benson and Mike. 

 

Enter the mother. Mike’s. She’s flown in from Japan to see her son, but Mike hasn’t told her he’s flying out the next day to Japan to see and take care of his dying dad, from whom he’s estranged. This will leave Mike’s mother with Ben, at Mike and Ben’s place, until Mike returns, whenever that may be, if he returns at all.

 

If you’re like me, or basically any somewhat logical person, you’ll want to ponder that setup again. What?! Why would someone allow his mother to fly from another continent for a visit only to take off, leaving her with a boyfriend whom, by the way, she’s never met? Why, in fact, would he allow her to fly in from the country where he’s going? Sure, she lives in Tokyo and the father, her ex, lives in Osaka but, even without checking Google Maps[1], most of us know that Houston is a hell of a long way from either Japanese city. Who would do that to his mother? Who would do that to his partner?

 

You have to go with the premise. You have no choice…unless you wish to abandon the book and go back to watching reruns of “Friends” or pick up a different book about something more plausible, something perhaps with sharks that fly and humans that shoot bullets from their nostrils.

 

I chose to read on. Nostril warfare sounds too violent. Still, for a story in which I think author Bryan Washington wants you to like both of the main characters, Mike is starting off at a distinct disadvantage. I mean, what an asshole, right? Sure, he’s off on a noble mission to take care of his father, but he knew about the father’s situation before his mother made the flight. She’s the one who broke the news to him…while she was still in Tokyo! 

 

The dying dad is an acceptable plot point to separate the two men, to allow them to think about where their relationship is at. The de facto mother-in-law being forced to live with the boyfriend is an unnecessary contrivance. Why does she even choose to stay in Houston when her son bails on her? Presumably, she’s going to have to fly back anyway. Why would she stick around?

 

I do like “Friends,” but I haven’t gotten into watching it in syndication. I suppose I could’ve watched the Olympics. But I didn’t. I said, Okay, lame premise, I’ll stop questioning you and try my best to focus on what will become of Ben and Mike. 

 

The story is told in three large chunks, the first and final parts told from Benson’s point of view while in Houston and the middle section is Mike’s experience in Japan. I didn’t feel like the two characters’ voices were distinguishable enough, something that is a challenge for most writers. Different POVs (points of view) is a fun structure to take on, but it works best when the characters are wildly different. Both Mike and Ben come off with similar outlooks, ennui mixed with indecision, which happens to be a potent combo to create a sort of paralysis. Their relationship is just hanging there. Maybe it’ll continue. Maybe it won’t. Even a shoulder shrug requires too much effort.

 

It’s all stereotypically millennial. I don’t care. Or maybe I do. Why should I have to figure it out?

 

Indeed, why should I?

 

Unfortunately, it’s not just the two main characters who can’t truly express themselves. Every other character seems just as incapable or unwilling. From Ben’s father to both of Mike’s parents, to a younger guy who works for Mike’s father, they all live shrouded in cloaks with stenciling on the back that says, “Don’t make me say or do anything I might really mean.” It’s taboo for anyone to express any sort of fondness for anyone else. Of course, they do. Begrudgingly. Fleetingly. Not directly but snidely, gruffly, often through action that goes against surface statements that would indicate otherwise. If it were one character, a reader might think, Well, isn’t she a curmudgeon? When it’s everyone, the thought is, Why am I still reading this? 

 

It’s going to sound cheap, but I kept reading because I bought the hardcover book last fall, paying thirty-six bucks Canadian, a harder pill to swallow when the book jacket reminds me it’s only twenty-seven American.  The book had been resting on my coffee table, begging to be picked up but being ignored (and too rarely dusted) because I was inundated with all the holds I’d placed on books from the library while it was shut down during lockdown. My pickups at the Have to Read nook at my local branch kept coming, three or four at a time. Ignoring Memorial for so long, I felt more duty-bound to read it all the way through. All those feelings of abandonment it had, seemingly forgotten alongside a heavily faded New York Times article I’d cut out about men getting neck lifts…I had to make it up to it.  (I’ll blame this extended period of total and pseudo lockdown for the fact I’ve come to think of books as my sad clique, a group they, no doubt, never wanted to be a part of. There’s no point in scrutinizing whether my pre-pandemic life was any less sad or weird.) 

 

So, yeah, I stuck with the book, reading it until the end.

 

The strange thing is, despite having legitimate things to bicker about with Memorial, I did not hate the book. I suppose I liked it, in that same sort of begrudging way that some of its characters may have liked each other. I cared about Ben and Mike the way I care about relationships of friends that got off to a good start but now seem to be coasting, drifting aimlessly. I found myself rooting for the fictional pair just as I root for my friends. Sometimes having the luxury of a bit of distance from the epicentre of a relationship, one can see its continuing value and put aside the daily moments of dissatisfaction and the wonders of whether there could be something better out there. But then that distance of outsiders like me includes an unknowing as to how dysfunctional things may be. Washington gives us some insight. Things are definitely dysfunctional with Ben and Mike. Is what they have enough?  

 

I do recommend Memorial despite its flaws. We all know relationships like Ben and Mike’s. We all know of people who shrug aplenty, but never take a step. An ex of mine was fond of that crass expression, “There comes a time when you have to shit or get off the pot.” It’s the kind of thing one--or all--of these characters might say. Bryan Washington is a good writer. I’m interested in reading more of his work. With more life experiences of his own, I hope he’ll develop more varied characters and plots with more oomph. 

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[1] Okay, I went there…to Google Maps, that is. Driving distance from Tokyo to Osaka: 506 kilometres. Flight time: one hour. Driving distance from Houston to Osaka: CAN’T DO IT! Physical distance 11,075 kilometres. Flight time: seventeen hours.

LIE WITH ME (Book Review)

 

By Philippe Besson

Translated by Molly Ringwald

(Éditions Julliard, 2017; Scribner, 2019)

I keep a list on my phone of books that I want to read. It’s grown so much I know I’ll never get to them all in this life. It makes me smile. Sometimes we are capable of change. I was one of those kids in junior high and in high school who would stand among the book stacks in a library—any library— shifting my weight back and forth, my legs suddenly very weak from the sheer pain of having to be there. It was the same as whenever I’d have to go shoe shopping with my mother or, now that I think of it, with anyone who wanted to “just try on a few.” Libraries and shoe stores were painful. I was one of those kids who’d stare blankly at all the crammed together book spines and say, “I can’t find anything I want to read.” Translation: I don’t want to read. Reading couldn’t compete with TV and record albums.

Maybe that’s why I like to scroll through my reading list. It feels overwhelming if I view it with that task-oriented part of my brain. Impossible! Too many! Stop adding titles. (High School Me pipes up: Which one’s the shortest?) The rest of me feels comforted. I’ll never run out of books to entertain me. And how amusing it is now that I find myself sitting in front of the television, remote in hand, scrolling through Netflix offerings, only to declare half an hour later, “I can’t find anything to watch.”

High School Me is quite happy that Philippe Besson’s Lie with Me is a short book, only 148 pages. That task-oriented part of my brain is relieved to delete it from the To Read list, not once but three times. I hadn’t realized that I’d kept reading about this book from various sources—a glowing write-up in The New York Times Book Review, a high rating from a friend on Goodreads, a rave from The Advocate: “The Best Gay Novel of 2019 Depicts Gay Sex with a Masterful Touch.” Oh, and High School Me—okay, University Me (I’m really dating myself)—might have been a little interested since the French book was translated by Molly Ringwald. Yep, that Molly Ringwald. Whatever it takes.

It’s hard to write much about the story without giving too much away. Indeed, you get a sense of the ending just by glancing at the dedication. As someone who went on to a teaching career as a passionate advocate of books, I always implored my students not to skip over the dedication. “There’s a story there,” I’d say. “Imagine what that relationship is between the author and the person in the dedication.” In this case, Besson will fill us in.

The story is told in three chapters, each set during a different time period. The first chapter is by far the longest, set in 1984, when Philippe is in his final year of high school in a French town people drive through on the way to somewhere else. This is where he meets Thomas Andrieu, a student in the same year, but not in the same classes. The school is on a sort of track system. Philippe is bound for higher learning and greater things; Thomas is not. The two boys get involved in a highly clandestine relationship. Is it just sex or something more? Could it even be love?

The second chapter involves a chance encounter in 2007 in Bordeaux, just more than an hour away from the place Besson grew up. The final chapter takes place in Paris, 2016, a meeting, agenda unknown. That’s all I want to say about the plot. This is a story about a gay relationship that cannot be fully realized in a society where homosexuality is still shunned. Lie with Me is similar in circumstance and style to E.M. Forster’s Maurice, Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain and the Oscar-winning movie, “Moonlight.”

Lie with Me is a curious work that makes the reader—or me, at least—nosy. It reads like a memoir. Indeed, Besson inserts himself—or someone who shares his name—as the main character. As written on the cover, the title reads: Lie with Me: A Novel. Is this creative nonfiction? Is it “based on a true story”? Do the other characters actually exist? What about that dedication? Is all of this imagined? In an interview I read afterward, Besson plays coy. Think what you want. What I think is there’s a lot of truth to it, with some cinematic flourishes, scenes and dialogue trumped up so the reader can feel the level of emotions Besson actually does from what he truly experienced. Perhaps he replaces the “you had to have been there” moments with something more universally compelling. It works for me.

What of the gay sex mentioned so prominently in that article in The Advocate? I was curious on a purely writerly level (of course) since I have some gay manuscripts in various stages and I’m not sure how descriptive I should get about such moments. What’s publishable? What will turn off a potentially larger audience? (Yes, I realize there’s some internalized homophobia in my thinking, but there’s also pragmatism—I need to get a publisher to say, “Yes! We’re publishing this!”) I’m not unlike Jeffrey Masters, the author of the article who wrote, “It's unfair, but I often feel a tiny part of myself bracing and hesitant when it seems like two queer characters might be heading towards any sort of sexual intimacy...In direct contrast to the casual nature by which sex between opposite-sex couples is depicted on mainstream screens, queer sex is deemed less appropriate to show, something to be ashamed of and kept hidden.” Of Lie with Me, Masters says, “[T]here is sex. Lots and lots of sex.”

Having finished the book, I wonder, Did I miss something? Truly, I think the article may mislead lusty readers. This is not Penthouse Forum. Neither is it Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness. Sex happens. I don’t find that it’s incredibly detailed or all that frequent. There’s a frankness to how it’s written, but that is Besson’s approach to all of the story. Maybe there is scads more sex than I recall. Maybe my inner prude glossed over all the juicy details. The overall interplay between characters and Besson’s attempts to comprehend the situations are far more memorable.

I’ll share two excerpts, both from the 1984 section of the book. The first feels like an accurate rendering of the impact of AIDS on gay adolescents at the time:

AIDS is there...We even know its true identity. It’s no longer referred to as ‘gay cancer.’ It’s there but we think we are safe from it. We know nothing of the grand decimation that will follow, depriving us of our best friends and old lovers, that will bring us together in cemeteries and cause us to scratch out names in our address books, enraging us with so many absences, such profound loss. It is there but we aren’t afraid yet. We believe that we are protected by our youth. We are seventeen years old. You don’t die when you are seventeen years old.

The second passage captures the entirety of an encounter Besson has with stranger:

At the beginning of August, I sleep with a boy who set up his tent at the Grenettes campsite. We have sex under the canvas, indiscriminately, on a blanket stinking of sweat. I went with him because of his blond hair, bleached out by the sun and salt, his golden skin and green eyes, and because it was easy. I wasn’t looking for a diversion, or a way to soothe my pain. I wasn’t looking for an alternative. I just gave in to the ease of it. That was all.

True, truth stretched or something that is completely imagined, Lie with Me is beautifully written and always compelling. Just read it. High School Me is chiming in: “It’s so short! And so much better than shoe shopping with your mother.” (What isn’t?)