Lot: Stories by Bryan Washington at Riverhead Books
Genre | Gay / Contemporary / Fiction |
Reviewed by | ParisDude on 27-August-2020 |
Genre | Gay / Contemporary / Fiction |
Reviewed by | ParisDude on 27-August-2020 |
In the city of Houston - a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America - the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He's working at his family's restaurant, weathering his brother's blows, resenting his older sister's absence. And discovering he likes boys.
Around him, others live and thrive and die in Houston's myriad neighborhoods: a young woman whose affair detonates across an apartment complex, a ragtag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, hurricane survivors, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, a reluctant chupacabra.
Bryan Washington's brilliant, viscerally drawn world vibrates with energy, wit, raw power, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot explores trust and love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.
To be honest, I bought this book merely because it won the Lambda Literary Award 2020 in the category Gay Fiction, and I simply wanted to find out what it was all about (i.e. why it had won the award). Curiosity killed the cat, I know, but I admit I felt inquisitive. I expected a novel, I discovered a collection of loosely connected short stories, the majority of which evolve around the central character of Nicolás. He is living in a poor part of Houston with his Ma, his brother Javi, his sister Jan, and his father. Nicolás grows up in precarious conditions; he’s forced to help his mother in the little family restaurant; his sister is often absent, trying to escape the dreary situation; his father has an affair with another woman and most of the time simply isn’t there either; his brother Javi is a drug dealer who thinks he can educate his little brother by beating him up. He does try to lift himself up by joining the Army, but soon dies in an accident. Nicolás discovers early on that he is gay, that he doesn’t want to become emotionally engaged because that would only lead to people leaving or bruising him some more; and that being poor and between two worlds—his Ma is black, his father Latino, so he is considered somewhat an outsider by both groups—is a heavy burden.
Interwoven with his stories, which are told in first person, are other side plots set in one of the countless other parts of the city (I had to check out Houston on Google Maps to get an overview of the nigh sprawling neighborhoods mentioned). Houston is one of the central elements that holds all these stories together; the other one is the raw language. This is no pink-tinted feel-good novel with romantic entanglements and happy endings. It’s a rough trip into places into which contemporary literature doesn’t venture that often: the very depths of the nefarious social conditions in which large parts of the US population live, unseen, unheard, uncared-for. It’s a necessary mirror for those who say, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way”, which is just another way to shun reality and shrug off any responsibility for the destitute.
Yes, in large parts, this is a bleak read. Swear words, drugs, violence, murders, betrayals, lost hopes abound. Dialogs are often bereft of meaningful exchanges; they are also devoid of quotation marks as if to signal the absence of a difference between inner and outer world. And yet, Bryan Washington has a way with words, he uses them powerfully, wielding them sometimes with sad poetry, sometimes like weapons, but always with a cutting edge, always very justly. What struck me most vividly was the underlying anger and, more strongly, the emotions beyond anger: sadness, and fatigue, and the despair of people who have given up, who have interiorized what the general consensus decrees and believe themselves that you are what you deserve to be, that some are rich because they are worth it, and others poor because they simply don’t try hard enough. This book is not an open, cheap accusation; it’s rather like a silent scream telling the reader that there is a Deep System in the USA—and that Deep System is not at all what people pretend, but an undercurrent that holds up the country. One could call it social blindness, one could call it self-righteousness, one could call it cold-blooded egotism.
I was overwhelmed by this book, the rich writing, the swaps between main plot and subplots. Despite the main character having a strong passive streak (he feels too tired to protest, too depleted to rebel), I found him very endearing, and I was glad to detect (perhaps mistakenly) a shimmer of hope at the very end of the book. I understand perfectly well why the Lambda Award was given to this book and this writer. Bryan Washington is a strong voice in contemporary writing, a young man who I’m sure still has many important things to tell.
DISCLAIMER: Books reviewed on this site were usually provided at no cost by the author. This book has been purchased by the reviewer.
Format | ebook and print |
Length | Novel, 236 pages |
Heat Level | |
Publication Date | 19-March-2019 |
Price | $12.99 ebook, $15.99 paperback |
Buy Link | https://www.amazon.com/Lot-Stories-Bryan-Washington-ebook/dp/B07F648HHZ |