Guest review by Jon Appleton: MEMORIAL by Bryan Washington

 

"Memorial is about the impossibilities of love as well as its opportunities ... sometimes tragic, often very funny, always true."

Jon Appleton is a freelance writer and editor based in London.

Just when Benson and Mike consider their relationship has run its course, but are afraid to call it quits (for the reasons that keep couples together), two significant things happen to Mike.

His mother, Mitsuko, arrives from Japan for a visit while his estranged father lays dying in Osaka (Mike is Japanese-American). Mike flees his life in Houston, Texas, leaving Ben with Mitsuko. Something big has already happened to Ben, before he met Mike, which we discover halfway through the story – something he has learned to accommodate but not entirely.

The first part of Memorial is narrated by Ben and deals with his experiences at work, with his friends and family, and his new unlikely flatmate, the dour and laconic mother-in-law. Ben adjusts to living without Mike in their apartment but can he move on without Mike in his life?

The second part of the novel is from Mike’s point of view in Japan. Whereas Ben’s paragraphs are bite-size and brittle (his voice is caustic at times), Mike’s are longer, more elliptical. It is through Mike we learn the story of their coming together and their falling apart.

As his father’s health deteriorates, Mike must take charge of the restaurant he runs – ironically, poignantly, the restaurant is named after his former wife. Mike negotiates new relationships with customers and staff and, like Ben, is offered the chance of new love. But he faces his lover’s dilemma: what does he want?

In the third section, Mike returns to Texas and both men have to make decisions – or do they?

Memorial is about the impossibilities of love as well as its opportunities. The novel challenges the foundations on which we construct our adult lives (including how we re-cast our parents). It poses the question: what is home? Mike writes:

‘I used to wonder what Ma meant when I asked her about Japan, because I could only remember so much of that shit from when I was younger, and she’d tell me it was different from home, but also the same. It was her home, not mine. But it was still home. Whatever that means.’

He also suggests that ‘You shouldn’t make a home out of other people’; people change, but ‘you’re stuck in whatever your idea of home was.’ He says this to his new lover, who doesn’t think it’s a problem. ‘We’ll all have plenty of homes in this life. It’s when you don’t that there’s an issue. That’s settling.’ Another acquaintance challenges Mike’s right to claim Japan as home: ‘But you’re not from here. You get to leave.’

For all his bluster, Ben is equally flummoxed. He tries to pin their projected break-up on Mike but Mitsuko is having none of it.

‘So Mike’s going home, I say and Mitsuko looks my way.

You could also say he’s leaving it, she says.’

Words trip over each other in quickfire banter. The novel brilliantly shows how language gets in the way of how we act and feel. Parents and children tiptoe round each other, wary of causing offence and intruding but equally wanting to make their bedrock beliefs crystal clear.

The novel is full of truisms, line after line, but in Washington’s hands they are never trite but malleable. Early in the book, Mike says, ‘Just because something isn’t working doesn’t mean it’s broken. You just have to want to fix it.’ Easy, right? Can you fault the logic of ‘We take our memories wherever we go, and what’s left are the ones that stick around, and that’s how we make a life’? Other arguments include: is good enough good enough? What about the policy that if something happens we deal with it? Words can be both weapons and shields.

Sometimes, you forget how people are, Mike suggests. And then they remind you. But there are some things you can never forget. Ben, an African-American, is all too aware of hard-line and casual racism. Both men acutely sensitive to homophobia. This is America in 2021 – this is life.

Memorial is sometimes tragic, often very funny, always true. A vital novel, which I’m so glad I’ve read and happily recommend.

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Memorial is published by Atlantic Books.

Jon is a regular reviewer here. Read more of his choices:

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stewart

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

The Biscuit Factory Girls by Elsie Mason

An Honest Man by Ben Fergusson

Clock Dance by Anne Tyler

Carnivore by Jonathan Lyon

Commonwealth by Ann Patchett

Guest review by Katy Evans-Bush: HOMESICK - WHY I LIVE IN A SHED by Catriona Davies

"We're all homesick."

Katy Evans-Bush is a poet (Salt Publishing), an essayist (Penned in the Margins) and a freelance writer and editor. Her blog, Baroque in Hackney, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2012. She is now living in Faversham, Kent, and her memoir of losing her flat, A Far Cry from Hackney, is forthcoming from CB Editions.

When I sat down to start writing my book about losing my flat and spending almost a year homeless, I knew that homelessness — maybe even especially hidden homelessness — is on the rise, but I hadn’t heard of a single book about it. The charities were silent on the subject; ‘hidden’ anything is a bit hard to count. The only two useful headlines in a Google search on ‘middle class homelessness’ were one telling me I would be very unlikely ever to become homeless, and a column in The New Statesman, by Nicholas Lezard, that was actually about me.

In July I discovered a new book, called Homesick: Why I Live in a Shed, by Catrina Davies — and let’s make no bones about it, this is an intensely political book. Catrina Davies was living in a shared house in Bristol, in a box room looking onto a brick wall. ‘Rent was a monthly trauma’. She was so consumed with the anxiety of money and ‘staying eradicated’ for monthly inspections (as she was off the lease) that she couldn’t work on the book she was trying to write.

She begins at the moment it all boils over: hunched on her bed, as her rowing housemates smash plates in the kitchen, she escapes into a tour of her old neighbourhood in Cornwall on Google Earth. She gets to the corrugated shack that used to house her father’s business — and in the days that follow, almost without meaning to, she makes a decision.

Homesick tells how Davies went to live in the shed. Instead of Virgil, she has Henry David Thoreau as a guide. She describes in minute detail the condition of the shed, the dynamic with neighbours, the reactions of her family and others, and how she eventually went legal (she still lives in the shed). Just as importantly, she contextualises how she came to fall foul of the housing crisis, which starts in her childhood. She talks about her mother’s travails as a private renter. (Private renting last year surpassed relationship breakdown as the number one cause of homelessness in London.) She is very clear about how, as a poor renter, you are effectively supporting a landlord.

She describes the local economy of Land’s End in detail, from the big summer houses lying vacant all year to the low-paid part-time work available to service them. Her sister and a few other people pay their mortgages by moving out of their homes in the summer — to sleep in fields, or vans — and renting them out to holiday people.

The first chapter starts with an epigraph from Walden: ‘the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life that is required to be exchanged for it, either immediately or in the long run’.

Davies’ memoir is also an attempt to glean meaning from her experience and its context. Her other guide is an old two-edition Oxford English Dictionary, the condensed one with the magnifying glass. She likes facts, and she looks things up.

‘I pulled out my phone and Googled the average wage for someone working full-time in Cornwall. My phone came back with £17,264. Half the houses in the window were on sale for more than half a million pounds. I ignored the houses in the window and Googled the average price of a house in Cornwall. My phone came back with £206,323. I typed in a little over the average wage — £18,000 — and estimated my outgoings at roughly £200 a month. the Halifax mortgage calculator said I would be allowed to borrow £51,000.’

It’s not just London. She is clear and insistent that what we need to do, to regain any sort of sustainable society, is recalibrate how we think about places. There is a field that gets sold in the course of the book. There is trauma, there’s making sense of her childhood, and there’s learning to go forward, but she can only do that last because of one thing. Her father actually owns the shed.

We need to recalibrate how we think about who we are: there are old friends whose paths have diverged irremediably from hers, and her different position in the place where she grew up is one of the most searching aspects of the book: ’I thought about my friend, how we had started off equal, then grown less and less equal over the years… Her story was intact. The structures her childhood had built were still standing…’

When I was homeless, one of my biggest anxieties was that I felt like a fraud: I looked fine, I had the same clothes on, I was still even working (some). Davies addresses this exact point in a characteristic way, writing: ‘I knew I was one of the luckiest people on the planet ... I wasn’t waking up on the side of the street in a cardboard box … Not yet, anyway ... I was safe and warm and educated. I had no right to feel miserable.’ But she did have a right to feel crippled by the anxiety and precarity of it all.

This is a thoughtful, sometimes funny, always interesting, deeply important book.

Homesick - Why I Live in a Shed is published by Riverrun.