Despite his choice of title, Bryan Washington certainly isn’t palavering in his third standalone novel. The book delivers 336 pages of routine moments conveyed with great momentum. From Jamaica through Houston and Toronto, all the way to Tokyo, “Palaver” gently leads readers through moments that may seem inconsequential individually, but ultimately comprise all the life-altering decisions and important relationships that define us.
The story follows two primary characters who are referred to simply as “the mother” and “the son.” After a long period of uninterrupted estrangement, the mother makes the journey from her home in Texas to her son’s apartment in Tokyo, where the two reunite. Inside his apartment and on the city streets, mother and son learn to navigate a past riddled with minefields.
Through this family, Washington sheds new light on themes familiar from his debut novel — homosexuality, immigration, parenthood and communication. “Palaver” is also a work of structural experimentation, stripping dialogue of its protective quotation marks and interspersing photographs of Tokyo amongst the chapters, creating a visual counterpart to the already-artful language.
Perhaps Washington’s greatest success lies in his perfected formula of timing and emotional impact. Each recalled memory arrives when it most enriches the present moment. Each foray into the mother’s mind — where she invites us to see the son through her eyes — comes just when empathy for her is scarce. Every realization appears once you have been lulled into understanding of one dynamic, only for it to be deconstructed and built anew.
The result is tidal: a pulling and pushing motion, a rhythmic rising and crashing of waves that defines the novel and creates an experience of cyclical sameness that mirrors their conversations. Their brief bouts constantly circle traumatic and defining events, neither willing to be the first to touch.
Additionally, their lack of names underscores how one character’s existence is impossible without the other. This line that many of us toe with our parents may seem fragile, but it ties us inextricably to them — little knots, moored deeply within each of us.
“Palaver” is also sensorially and philosophically ripe, offering quotable prose on every page and providing important commentary on long-standing questions. My favorite of these transpires in one of the son’s memories of an injury. After a huge fall, he comments he “would never forget how his body failed to acknowledge the impact when there was no one else around to confirm it.”
Another of Washington’s most apparent skills at work here is his ability to make something as foreign as parenthood deeply accessible by a childless college student, for whom children are a distant apparition of the future. But in his novel, his prose can plant you in a city across the world and create a deep sense of understanding. Children, for instance, have an amazing ripple effect on a household, which the novel describes as “a messiness [that pervades] everything. Every crease had been ruffled. Its straightness had been shaken.”
A straightness disturbed. A tether reinforced. Together, these concepts create the defining tension of the novel. Each moment builds understanding in a world of miscommunication and emotions left unexpressed that looks very similar to our own. There is a realization the mother has that voices this far more succinctly than I can — that “the big moment might actually be an accumulation of smaller moments, each of them irreversible, charting a path that knotted and turned until it became distinctly itself” — a whole bunch of ‘palaver’ in pursuit of truth.
“Palaver” will be released on Tuesday.
