Many Houstons

On Bryan Washington’s Memorial

Lauren Phillips
September 2024

Southwest Freeway, Houston. October 27, 2020. Photo by xiefangzhang will sun.

Bryan Washington’s debut novel, Memorial, was a strange book arriving at a strange time. Published in late October of 2020, amid the isolation of a global pandemic and a crescendo of political anxiety, it told a story less about love than about the complexity of relationships; less about resolutions than about learning to live with uncertainty. Notably, it was less about things happening than the spaces between events, and the waiting, dreading, and anticipation—eager or otherwise—that surrounds them.

Memorial earned high praise for the sparse delivery and keenly realistic dialogue framing the story of Benson and Mike, two thirty-ish men, one Black, the other Japanese American, navigating a relationship in quiet crisis. The novel’s inciting incident occurs when Mike’s mother comes to visit from Japan at the same time Mike must travel to Osaka to see his estranged, and dying, father—leaving Benson in the uneasy position of hosting his boyfriend’s mother in their shared home in Houston’s Third Ward.

Washington called Memorial a “gay slacker dramedy,” told from a first-person perspective that shifts from Benson to Mike and back again—a low-stakes but visceral account of the real-life accretions of identity, culture, and the unacknowledged (and unexpressed) needs that collect on the hull of good intentions. The novel handles its themes of displacement, isolation and togetherness, desire and disappointment, with the same understated frankness with which it addresses race, working-class queerness, hookup culture, and family dynamics. Less obvious, but of critical importance to Memorial’s success, is the deftness with which Washington uses time and distance to construct a spatial lattice across the immense sprawl of Houston and its suburbs against which the events of the story are set.

Both inside and outside the worlds of architectural discourse and urban planning, the idea of “Houston-ness” is loaded with summary judgements. The notion that Houston “doesn’t have zoning,” for instance, is at once true, and often completely misunderstood, as it suggests an undifferentiated free-for-all. However, the lack of top-down, prescriptive land use has not produced urban chaos, but has rather allowed the urban fabric to crystallize into self-organized and interconnected pockets of structure.

In this sense, the metaphor of Houston as a series of tightly packed towns connected by freeways is probably more apt. To live in Houston, particularly as a transplant, is to cull, over time, those vast swaths of the city that, for whatever reason, offer little immediate value; assembling, bit by bit, one’s own curated version of Space City and the paths one carves moving through it. No two Houstons are the same.

It is tempting, and maybe not inaccurate, to think of Houston’s distinct physiology, its intricate networks of interlinked neighborhoods and districts, as a metaphor for Memorial’s emotional landscape, somehow mirroring the untidy relational dynamics of its twin protagonists with its backdrop of urban sprawl. But the city also plays an active role in setting the pace of events in response to one another, opening spaces within the narrative for critical reflection by slowing things down.

There’s an inherent sludging to moving across Houston, a kind of emotional slow-cooking (Houstonians are fond of saying that any two points within the 610 Loop are always exactly 20 minutes apart), that puts a drag on reaction time. And so, when Benson travels from the Third Ward to Montrose, or all the way out to Katy, we’ve been in the car with him, processing whatever might be waiting for us at the other end. None of us are of the same frame of mind at the end of the journey as we were when we got in the car.

Benson’s Houston (and Mike’s Osaka, to a lesser degree) is constructed for the reader through the character’s movement through the city over time. As Benson responds to an emergency call, he tells his sometimes-estranged father that he is on his way, “twenty minutes, tops,”— before remembering he doesn’t have his car. Accepting a ride from, Omar, a new sometimes-romantic interest:

We glide across the freeway like bats. Traffic is light. 

But on the other side of his stiff visit with his father, the return journey:

He takes the long way into the city. We never pull off Westheimer. Omar just cruises beside the highway, cutting through back alleys and suburbs. When we emerge from the other side, it’s already midnight, on a weekday, which means the streets are mostly empty, except for the people waiting for buses and all the folks with nowhere to go. 

Omar’s a steady driver. There’s no jolt when we hit our stoplights. He just slides into them, until we ease our way home.

There is a deftness and economy to the way Washington knits time and distance together in just a few lines, along with the subtle sensations of the body’s movement through space.

While Houston’s expanse and lack of rigid boundaries may parallel the characters’ own struggles with identity and connection—and a relationship marked by its own form of spatial disorganization—it is Washington’s treatment of time and distance that builds a distinct spatial matrix that both facilitates and impedes the narrative. 

To revisit Memorial nearly four years after its release, and as someone who turned out to be passing through Houston at the time, brings back to mind the character and canvas of a city stitched together by moments of possibility. And it brings to mind that time when, abruptly, the possibilities seemed to cease. The world of 2020 was an empty place: Benson’s Houston, as well as my own, had absconded, leaving an unsettled quietude that leaked into our cramped apartments from under the front doors. And yet, at night, the formerly clogged arteries of Houston’s freeways opened to a new world of possibility, as we raced to nowhere with the windows down…

Washington’s Memorial is more than just a story about two men navigating their relationship—it is an exploration of how we move through and make sense of our environments, and of how we construct those environments through the time we spend waiting to do something else.

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Lauren Phillips edits for Architecture Writing Workshop. He is a Lecturer at Huckabee College of Architecture at Texas Tech University in Lubbock.

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