If you’ve contemplated writing the definitive short story collection
about life in this Northwestern town, you might want to cross-reference
your Moleskine against Jon Raymond’s new book, Livability. Local
boy Raymond was widely praised for his first novel The
Half-Life, but he’s best known for the films based on two of his
short stories: Old Joy, a careful, studied depiction of
contemporary male friendship, and the just-released Wendy and
Lucy, a wrenching little tale of a girl and her dog. Both stories
can be found in Livability, a new collection of nine stories
deeply rooted in the dreariness and fecundity of the Pacific
Northwest.
Livability‘s cover art is a drawing of a blocky neighborhood,
cars parked in white driveways (is that a Volvo?), and two tiny men
exchanging words in the street:
“Hi Mike, how is it going?
“Oh, hi John. Things are alright I guess. The average level of
imperfection.”
The words “level of imperfection” ooze cutely out of their speech
bubble. This cover suits its book’s contents as well as any I’ve seen:
The lives depicted in Raymond’s nine stories are largely placid ones,
in which regret sidles alongside happiness, and change occurs as a
process, rather than an event.
In “Words and Things,” a young freelance writer, David, meets a
sculptor, Jen, when he interviews her for a magazine article about her
work. After a familiarly hesitant flirtation (“Would it be really
unprofessional if I asked to kiss you right now?”), the two begin
dating—but the bloom, as they say, isn’t long on the rose. “When
Jen learned that his parents still paid his car insurance for him, a
certain mystery slipped away.” The problem between the two goes deeper
than car insurance, of course: Jen’s approach to her work (and to life)
is driven by an urge to create “things that unquestionably existed in
the world, real things that you could touch and care for and find
comfort in. Not pictures of things or interpretations of things, or
even clever commentaries on the vagaries of representation, as David
relished, but things themselves…. Writing, Jen thought, seemed like a
very sad pursuit.” This fundamental incompatibility between, to
paraphrase Wallace Stevens, ideas about the thing and the thing itself,
ultimately finishes the relationship. The story leaves a certain rueful
aftertaste; for if Jen rejects David for his infatuation with “black
marks on paper, standing in for people and objects and events that
could never be seen or felt,” then it would seem she’s rejecting the
reader as well.
There’s a wistfulness to most of these stories. A first-generation
American of Chinese descent hires two Mexican day laborers to tend his
yard, and ends up inviting them to an awkward dinner party. A man
builds an elaborate tiki bar in his basement, while on the streets of
Portland his childhood best friend succumbs to addiction. A teenaged
girl persuades a reluctant classmate to let her give him a
blowjob—and youth, vulnerability and vanity mingle in Raymond’s
line, “She was proud of her technique.”
These stories stand on their own, but the book as a whole is a
welcome addition to the literature of the region. And there’s something
satisfying about locating these stories within Portland, whether riding
the bus from 135th and Stark to the Lloyd Center with a young Russian
girl or imagining an overdose in Washington Park. Take this eulogy for
what I can only assume is Ozone Records, from Old Joy: “The
record store on Burnside had gone out of business and the last albums
on the shelves were all by friends of ours.”
It’s conceivable that to a reader located elsewhere in the
country—a state where the sun is more reliable, or where urban
density precludes the physical and emotional space that surrounds
Raymond’s characters—these stories might seem… depressing. The
book is firmly and explicitly located in Oregon, after all, and the sky
here is gray most of the time. But Oregonians inured to a certain
low-level melancholia will appreciate the collection—not because,
as an early review in the San Francisco Chronicle put it, the
book’s characters lead “lives of quiet desperation,” but because
they’re living lives that are, like most of ours, simply quiet. ALISON
HALLETT