Review: Reading Queer Isolation in Bryan Washington's Palaver

In Bryan Washington’s sensitive and circumspect third novel Palaver, a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award, two characters called only “the mother” and “the son” are drawn into the close quarters of the son’s Tokyo apartment after years of estrangement. We learn that the mother, who is living in Texas, received a call from her son at 4 am Tokyo time and knew immediately that he was in crisis, even though he said very little. The call disturbed her enough that she boarded a flight to Japan. Later, in a flashback from the son’s perspective, we learn that her mother’s intuition was right on—the night he called, he had almost stepped in front of a train after his married lover told him they couldn’t see each other anymore.

As the son and the mother carefully dance around the circumstances of their estrangement in the present-day timeline of her visit, we see how he has been living: teaching English to locals who drift in and out of his life, meeting his lover in hotels, and visiting a gay bar called Friendly in the queer neighborhood of Ni-chōme, where he drinks heavily and engages in restrained social interactions. The mother, meanwhile, strikes up a friendship, or possibly more, with the owner of a restaurant down the street from the son’s apartment. Through their tense and delicate exchanges, we wonder if the mother and son are headed for reconciliation or explosion.

Flashbacks tell more of the story, but not all. We learn that their falling out was partly related to the son’s broken relationship with his brother, Chris, and partly to do with the son being queer. In a bitter argument, the son reminds the mother that she used to hit him, though it is not clear if the abuse was most closely connected to the son’s relationship with Chris or with his sexuality. We learn that the son objected to Chris joining the military, that Chris came back from overseas a changed man, that he is now in prison. We also follow the mother from her girlhood in Jamaica to her young adulthood in Toronto, where she developed a relationship with her sons’ father.

Loneliness permeates the book. A lot of (often exoticizing) articles have been written about the “loneliness epidemic” in Japan by outside observers, but Washington steers clear of invoking this stereotype. The Tokyo of Palaver is a bustling metropolis full of mostly friendly people, many of whom are trying to connect. Loneliness is not a setting but an obstruction lodged in the throat, on which both mother and son are choking. The arrival of the mother seems to knock the son out of his well-worn path of isolation and he begins to draw closer to the people in his orbit, particularly the other patrons and the bartender at Friendly. Washington also subverts the typical tropes of queer tragedy. One might expect the son’s married lover to be a closeted gay man desperate to hide his shameful secret. Instead, the son visits his lover’s home and discovers that he and his wife have an arrangement in which they both see other people, and that in fact she is also queer. It is the wife who invites the son over, explaining that though she needs her husband at home to care for their newborn baby, she wants the son to be a part of their lives—a part of their family even.

What’s especially interesting about Palaver’s narrative structure, weaving back and forth through various threads of the past, is that so much of what you would expect to see is omitted. Though we learn some details about how the son and Chris fell out, for the most part the actual events that caused the fissure in their relationship are not included. Nor is there any flashback depicting the mother’s abusive behavior. The fact that we don’t actually see these dramatic scenes makes the story feel quieter, more vulnerable, more generalized, and indeed, easier to relate to.

It’s also interesting that the revelation of the mother’s abuse doesn’t prevent us from sympathizing with her, from being just as invested in her story as we are in his. In flashbacks we learn that she was very close with her older brother, Stefan, and was initially reluctant to move to Toronto with her friend because she felt protective of him, knowing that Jamaica wasn’t a safe place for a visibly gay man to be living. In the present-day timeline we learn Stefan died of AIDS. It is easy to imagine that this was a transformative experience for her, and that the negative feelings and reactions she had about the son’s sexuality were a result of fear. What mother wouldn’t want to protect her son from what she sees to be a portent of early death? So I do sympathize with the mother; it’s easy to. But I don’t know how I feel about that, or exactly what Washington intends by making her so forgivable, so naturally worthy of our attention and care and well wishes.

I was an out lesbian by the time I entered high school and I felt grateful as a young person that my family didn’t abuse me or disown me—these were the standards at the time. But my sexuality affects the way they treat me, in ways I didn’t realize until well into adulthood. Like the son in Palaver, I am unmarried, without children, my career does not consist of a typical 9-to-5, and I have gone to great lengths to put physical distance between myself and the place where I grew up, where my family still lives. There are many reasons why I don’t feel safe or comfortable there, reasons anyone might understand if they gave it even a moment’s thought. But no one in my family comes to me, physically or otherwise. They will not, as the mother does in Palaver, come to the place where I live now, and they will not ask me questions or otherwise take an interest in my life because it does not conform to their expectations. When you’re living in the fishbowl of your own queer life, when it’s all you’ve ever known, you might not recognize that the people who have always surrounded you do not treat you with a great deal of care. It changes the way you interact with others, and with the world. Maybe you choose not to do so at all, or only in a limited capacity.

This is the phenomenon that Palaver represents so well: when your family creates a space that is hostile to your natural way of being, you will probably come to live your life unnaturally. The son avoids intimate attachments because all evidence suggests these result in pain and disappointment. In fact, the mother is in some ways doing the same, because the hostility with which she has treated the son is ruining her, too. But that isn’t the end of the story, or it doesn’t have to be. Washington demonstrates that there is always a way out of self-imposed isolation. There are outstretched hands all around, waiting to pull us back into the world.

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