“Visitor”
by Bryan Washington
from the January 20, 2020 issue of The New Yorker
Bryan Washington’s “Waugh” (see post here) was published in The New Yorker in late 2018, a few months before his debut collection Lot came out. Now he says, in his interview here, that he’s wrapping up edits on his debut novel. I have to admit, I never did look into Lot. I’m glad to have this reminder!
He knocked on my door about a month after the funeral. I almost didn’t answer, since I wasn’t expecting my fuck buddy. It was entirely too late for anyone to be visiting, but the man in front of me said that he’d been a friend of my father’s—and I slipped on the face I wore for those people. It was three or four in the morning. He’d caught a late flight from Kingston to Houston.
Then the man said something else, in a heavy patois. I asked him to repeat it.
His lover, this guy said, rubbing both of his elbows.
I made a new kind of face. Except it couldn’t have been a new kind of face. We only get so many.
What, I said.
It’s true, he said.
No, I said, and then I laughed.
Sounds like quite the visitor!
Please share your thoughts below!
Autofiction from the millennial set, predictable and tiresome. The weird line breaks and pseudo-minimalism, the lack of quotation marks, the short sentences, sort of half-journal, half-poem; just a mishmash all around (not to mention derivative of Jenny Offill, who’s overrated, but at least it was her own thing). Makes me want to read William Gass or Flannery O’Connor or even just a plain old Joyce Carol Oates story to cleanse my palate. Just someone who is a real writer. Among the young black set I’ll take Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah or Hanif Abdurraqib by miles over this brother.
The protag works at a gas station, is rude and curses a lot? And yet on the other hand he knows the Rothko Chapel? Then let’s namedrop some more Houston places and hipster food for “texture” and get some gay cred for mentioning that one buys lube at CVS? Oy. That’s a story? That’s literature? Puh-lease.
Funke is a mildly interesting character and the “visitor” shows potential. But the writer is hack. Sorry. Just telling it how I see it. Here’s an answer of his from his interview with the New Yorker. The patois and content are both laughably similar to that of his narrator in this so-called story. “Houstonians are just so fucking funny. Good lord. My bánh mì guy at this diner I live by, and the lady who hooks me up at the jerk-chicken spot, and the older women who drag me (thoughtfully, lovingly) at this spa I go to tell stories so much better than I do. Nearly everyone here is a storyteller of some kind.”
Navel gazing about “historically marginalized communities” is still navel gazing. No way should this be anywhere near the New Yorker. Shorten it by half and it’d be worthy of a lower-tier lit mag (or Medium) at best. Gay black dude writes about being gay black dude. ‘Make sure to give it a lot of likes on social or you’re a homophobe racist’ seems to be have been his path to a “career.” ‘Oh, and here’s my preferred pronoun and hashtag SJW.’ Buzzfeed Fiction apparently is a thing now and this is further evidence of it. Alas, New Yorker, alas. Do better.
I had heard good things about Bryan Washington, and his previous story seems to have been well-received here, but this one didn’t really work for me. I liked the premise–meeting the gay lover of a homophobic father–but the choppy prose and overabundance of dialogue (a lot of which came off as filler to me) were a bit grating.
I enjoy good minimalism, but I think in order to do it well, every sentence should count. Quite a few sentences here seemed to exist while being extraneous to the story:
“I made a new kind of face. Except it couldn’t have been a new kind of face. We only get so many.”
“And I shivered, just a bit, but I didn’t get up or anything, and I shut my eyes, and it wasn’t entirely unpleasant.”
Also, a lot of “fuck”s thrown in offhandedly.
Not expecting every writer to be the next Raymond Carver, but I do think Washington would have benefited from a more stringent editor.
One credit to Washington: he can write a good ending. The scene in which the narrator is asked his father’s true love in a security question, only to find it is not the name of his mother, is very well done.
Compared to the previous week’s entry, “Found Wanting,” which did read like a memoir, this story takes on a near fairy-tale quality. Have we ever had two queer stories back to back in the New Yorker?
Sean H. seems to be the new David around here. I read and enjoyed this story although something naggingly told me it was a bit artless and lacking. Still..it worked on an emotional level. The very accurate evisceration by Sean H., though, has certainly lowered it in my mind. I’m always glad to come to this site although of late it seems less trafficked. I always get a good range of viewpoints from the contributors.
Great story, intensely interesting, with no stumbles I could detect. I guess, judging from other comments here, that I am the right audience for this style, and others are not.