Bryan Washington’s sophomore novel “Family Meal” is a collage of gay bars and kitchens across Houston, Los Angeles, Osaka, and suburban Louisiana. Despite its broad wingspan of settings, it is a rather intimate novel that follows Cam and TJ, childhood friends and maybe-lovers, reconnecting after the death of Cam’s boyfriend Kai. Cam, struggling with disordered eating, substance abuse, and an addiction to sex, has moved back to Houston to live with TJ, whose family he lived with after the death of his parents in his adolescence.

Unlike the academic ingenues that grace the novels of Brandon Taylor and Gabrielle Zevin, Bryan Washington’s characters are pink-collar millennials in the American South who work too hard to have time to question the woes of capitalism or agonize over their artistic or literary ventures. Most of the intense conversations and memory sequences in “Family Meal” happen before, after, or during a long shift at the bar or the bakery, and these workplaces align the novel more closely with the television show “The Bear” or Becca Shuh’s essay “Bad Waitress” than Sally Rooney’s “Normal People.” “Family Meal”’s cover, designed by Grace Han, depicts two interlocking forks, which accurately characterizes the interactions featured in this book. The characters in “Family Meal” face constant forks of indecision, their sexual encounters rarely end in affectionate embraces, and their dialogue often reads like they are jabbing forks into each other’s skin. And then, of course, there is the actual cooking. “Family Meal” is primarily a novel about how different people from different cultural backgrounds prepare and eat food, and the meals cooked by the characters provide a buffer for the forks and knives of their words. “Family Meal”’s title and cover suggest that the novel will join, or at the very least interact with, the literary and theatrical lineage of dinner party scenes, but Washington has little interest in this bourgeois tradition. Most conversations over food between the characters in “Family Meal” spark, simmer, and prematurely dissolve, making the novel a fragment of different courses rather than a full meal.

This repetition unfortunately offers little variety other than the dishes prepared. The characters’ dialogue consistently revolves around the same topics: sex, grief, and work. Cam, TJ, and their coworkers-turned-friends are often too exhausted to fully delve into the complexity of their own experiences. This lack of depth is less of an intentional commentary on the depleting and demoralizing nature of working-class life for queer or racially marginalized characters living in a conservative state, and more so a product of frustrating miscommunication and a lack of emotional intelligence. Washington’s dialogue is sparse and filled with aggressively modern slang that screams “millennials in 2023,” and these speech patterns do not vary from character to character. We are constantly told that these people have strong personalities, and while their actions at least suggest that they are irresponsible, none of them read as particularly headstrong or unique.

The most interesting glimpse we get into a more complex inner world is Cam’s chronic nightmares of Kai dying in increasingly violent ways as Cam himself struggles with substance abuse, sex addiction, and disordered eating. “Family Meal” is a novel that introduces the side effects of grief without examining how to treat them. Cam reaches a breaking point, after which there is a time jump and a perspective shift to TJ’s narration, which leaves Cam’s healing process largely unexamined. This shift is signaled by the character name changing in the chapter header, but their voices are similar to the point of being indistinguishable. If you flipped to a random page in “Family Meal,” it would be difficult to discern who is speaking. Both Cam and TJ curse heavily, are not at all forthcoming with their emotions, and have transactional sexual encounters that they describe in the same sardonic, bored tone. Cam curling up on a futon with a cat named Mochi and delivering level-headed, logical advice is not supported by any scenes of him working through his own personal trauma, and the time jump completely halts the momentum of the novel and divides Cam and TJ’s narration indefinitely.

The pages between Cam and TJ’s perspectives are occupied by an interlude of photographs and posthumous narration from Kai. These photographs are non-descript images of various flowers and homes and do not provide additional texture to his character or the novel as a whole.

The most interesting passage of narration in the novel is when Cam describes the night before he went to rehab. In a single sentence that occupies two whole pages, the reader experiences Cam’s breakdown alongside him, and its effect is incredibly profound. The reader feels his grief, his fear, and his anger in intense depth, and this is a testament to what Washington is capable of as a writer. It would be even more powerful in retrospect if the reader experienced Cam’s healing process alongside him in the second half of the novel, rather than being thrown into TJ’s relationship drama.

In the context of Washington’s oeuvre, “Family Meal” is forgettable and weak compared to his shorter fiction and debut novel “Memorial,” both of which explore a lot of the same themes as “Family Meal” with more success and finesse. While its characters are ultimately forgettable, Washington is a promising writer whose second novel fell victim to a sophomore slump. More attention to dialogue and characterization would have made “Family Meal” much more effective, but it is still charming nonetheless. Food really is these characters’ universal language, and when their words fail them, they are able to express their deep love for each other through their cooking. Unfortunately, the reader cannot taste this affection through the page.