For the first time since I started using my current rating system a year or two ago, I’m giving a book less than 3 stars. Typically, I give a book at least 3 stars if I finish it because if I’m not liking it, I’ll usually DNF. But I kept expecting this book to redeem itself.
The novel follows a mother and son who are only ever referred to as “the mother” and “the son.” They have been estranged since the son moved to Japan years ago, and the mother has now come to visit him in Tokyo, somewhat against his wishes. During the day they mostly go their separate ways while the son works and spends time with his lovers and with friends who have essentially become found family, but they reconnect periodically for conversation. The story is told in a non-linear fashion with flashbacks to the son’s childhood and adolescence as well as the mother’s upbringing in Jamaica, particularly her relationship with her gay brother. The son is also gay, and there are allusions to his sexuality causing tension within the family.
This is very much a slice-of-life novel, but not in a way that worked for me. I’ve enjoyed slice-of-life books before, but here it felt like very little happened that was meaningful, especially between the mother and son. Their relationship is a primary focus of the novel, yet I never felt like the book was doing the work to help me understand it. There are long conversations, but they rarely seemed to deepen my understanding of either character or of why they became estranged in the first place. This is a dialogue-heavy book with spare prose and little interiority, so I needed those conversations to do more work than they did. The supporting cast didn’t help much either: most of the son’s friends are indistinguishable from each other.
My biggest frustration was how little the novel actually explained. We know there is tension between the mother and son, and between the son and his brother, but we’re given little more than allusions about what happened. The book jacket frames the novel as being about homophobia and the mother’s favoritism toward one son, but surprisingly little of that actually appears on the page. I kept waiting for those conflicts to come into focus, and they never really did.
The ending left me particularly frustrated. There is a change in the relationship between the mother and son . . . for no reason. It’s not clear what had fundamentally shifted between them, and it felt abrupt and unearned, and frankly it left me feeling like I’d wasted my time.
The concept is interesting, and I think I could have enjoyed what the book jacket promised. And I think that the author has the potential to accomplish a lot with dialogue. However, the execution didn’t live up to the premise. I kept reading because I thought the pieces would click into place by the end, but they just never did. 2.5 stars.
