"Livability" by Jon Raymond

In the Acknowledgments section of Jon Raymond’s short story collection, Livability, you’ll find a shout-out to Kelly Reichardt for, as Raymond puts it, “seeing something here.” It’s an apt thanks because without Ms. Reichardt’s cooperation adapting two of Raymond’s tales – “Old Joy” and “Train Choir” – into feature-length films, it is doubtful such a timely writer as Raymond would have ever gotten the kind of exposure he’s enjoyed since.

Doubtful, but not certain, because Raymond, see, is a quietly talented writer, one whose creative instincts would have earned him a following regardless of where he worked. Lucky for proud Oregonians, Raymond’s tales are rooted firmly in the American Northwest and he’s taken advantage of the creative spirits both in the Portland area and along the West Coast.

“Old Joy” is the opening story in Livability and this is its third incarnation. In late 2004, Artspace Books in San Francisco published a 72-page collaboration between Raymond and photographer Justine Kurland. Guided by Kurland’s photos – which, according to an interview with Raymond in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, focus on the landscape and with “legacies of ‘60s liberalism and utopianism” – Raymond composed a lean narrative of old friends struggling to connect on a trip to remote hot springs deep in a mountain forest.

Both with that story and his third in this collection, “The Coast,” Raymond’s fiction conveys troubled longing while evoking a strong sense of place for his characters. “The Coast” relays the events of a few days not long after a man’s wife is all too quickly killed in a bicycle accident. The narrator takes time off to vacation in the same coastal house he and his wife occasioned in Newport, Ore. While there, he considers exactly how much he ought to grieve and what it means to honor and respect her memory, in lieu of an old friend’s fateful reemergence.

We didn’t talk long, just enough to catch up on the recent news: Karin’s new restaurant, Dan’s new dog. When her dinner arrived, she asked me to stay, but I decided I’d been there long enough. I figured I still owed it to my dead wife to despair a little this evening.
“But maybe I’ll see you around?” I said.
“Definitely,” she said. “I’m here until Monday.”
“I’m here until Monday, too,” I said, and hurriedly, as her plate steamed, we exchanged cell phone numbers and hugged one more time.
“I really can’t believe you’re here,” she said again.
“Your food’s getting cold,” I said. “I’ll talk to you later.”
“You better.”

There’s also a frank, familiar quality to his character’s speech patterns that reflects a segment of the 18-35 demographic in a kind of fresh and welcome manner. One man’s luggage is mere “crap” he throws on the floor, a girl is described as “moony” and one girl can’t “tell whether David, the critic, is gay or what.”

“Train Choir,” the final story in this collection, was the second of Raymond’s stories Ms. Reichardt adapted for the big screen. Released in 2008 by the name of “Wendy and Lucy” and met with wide critical acclaim, this last story follows a female drifter and her dog as she treks north to Alaska. Written in the wake of Hurricane Katrina as a meditation on poverty, “Train Choir” is at times an angry, desperate story of what it’s like to hopelessly try to get a foothold on middle-class American life. It and the rest of the stories in the collection are drawn in lines melancholic, but clean and efficient: never do revelations (when they come) seem unlikely and rarely is the stroke that’s drawn awkward or improbable.

Raymond’s storytelling works in spare, honest prose. It is a style that aches in ways a consumer-conscious, environmentally-friendly generation of young adults will recognize. His characters try to quiet the nostalgia American life evokes when living in the city while pining for quieter, less cluttered places which are increasingly difficult to find. The timeliness of Raymond’s writing is an enticing, modest accomplishment. That it is so pinned-down to a region the author clearly knows well, and that this region is populated by such reflective and contemporary characters – these things make the experience of reading Livability like spending a summer in one of Oregon’s coastal towns. A place of beautiful, aging, battered shorelines. A place not fully spoiled by consumerism, and where dreams haven’t been abandoned so much as traded at a more honest price. It is the price of life in America today.