Portland, OR

• “Livability: Stories,” a collection of short stories by Jon Raymond

• Wendy and Lucy and Old Joy, two films by Kelly Reichardt

The city of Portland, Oregon is home to a vast array of talent; among its many well-known residents are singer-songwriters M. Ward and the late Elliott Smith, the bands Blitzen Trapper, The Shins and the Dandy Warhols, the filmmakers Gus van Sant and Todd Haynes, and the writers Miranda July and Chuck Palahniuk. Add to that the author Jon Raymond, whose vibrant new collection of short stories revels in the natural world around Portland – displaying what Haynes calls Raymond’s “sense of regional identity.”

There is a symbiotic relationship between filmmakers and other artists in the city; Gus van Sant had a working relationship with Elliott Smith and frequently employs his songs to great effect. Most recently van Sant featured the song “Angeles” in his 2007 film Paranoid Park – itself based on a novel by Portlander Blake Nelson; the same song was also used in a key scene in van Sant’s best known film, Good Will Hunting. Miranda July, the artist, filmmaker and writer whose superb 2007 collection of stories “No One Belongs Here More than You” explored the same territory as does “Livability,” and is quoted on the back, saying “these stories stick with me and rival my own sense of inertia, isolation and wild invention in the Pacific Northwest; like real life, they head in one direction and always end up in another.”

Two of the stories in this collection, “Old Joy” and “Train Choir,” have been adapted into independent films by Raymond and the director Kelly Reichardt. The former is the tale of two friends attempting to rekindle a long-dormant friendship through a spontaneous weekend camping trip. Starring Will Oldham – better known as the inimitably-bearded folk singer Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – Old Joy makes use of the rich descriptiveness in Raymond’s story and its sparse use of dialogue, concentrating as much on the world around the characters as their interaction with one another.

“Train Choir” tells the tale of Verna, (renamed Wendy in the transition to film) a young woman travelling to Alaska to get a job on the “slime line” in Alaska’s salmon canneries. Exactly why she has decided to take a job in such a remote location – Wendy is originally from Indiana – is never explained, but her newfound poverty informs the mood of the film, and everyone who comes into contact with her. With the current state of the global economy, this is an apt undercurrent. Played with finesse by Michelle Williams, Wendy is travelling with her dog, Lucy, in a beat-up old Camry, and upon getting to Portland is confronted by a gang of drugged-up misfits around a campfire – Oldham has a cameo spot as their dishevelled, rambunctious leader. Already watching every cent, Wendy has the misfortune of having her car – which doubles as her bed – break down unexpectedly. She is subsequently arrested for stealing dog food at a supermarket, and when she comes back to get Lucy from the spot outside where she was left tied up, is shocked to find that she went missing. A lot of exasperated to-ing and fro-ing ensues between the security guard in the parking lot outside the store, the garage, and the pound. Eventually she finds Lucy, but has had to give up the car to the garage – and pay them for the favour. Wendy realises she can’t afford keep Lucy and get to Alaska, so she sets her free in the grassy back yard of a well-maintained house, and deposits $30 in their letterbox in the hope that whoever lives there will look after her. She hops in an empty boxcar on a train – a place that has remained a constant safe harbour for those down on their luck – and drifts into the future: “She needed to move, and this machine was moving in her direction… far ahead, the engine’s whistle blew, full-throated and remorseful. She knew she was going to be chasing that sound for a long time now,” reads the final paragraph.

Both Wendy and Lucy and Old Joy are as visually economic as the financial conditions of their protagonists, and Reichardt adopts Raymond’s sense of sparse, open spaces and the freedom this affords the characters. Although “Train Choir” is no longer than any of the other stories in the collection – each is around 20 pages – it, like “The Coast”, “The Wind,” and many of the other stories in “Livability,” feels more like a novella than a short story. Although there is very little dialogue in some of these stories, Raymond is not a minimalist – in fact, he is just the opposite: Jonathan Raban in the New York Review of Books labels him a “prose maximalist,” saying Raymond’s characters are happier relating their innermost thoughts to the reader than to other characters. Employing potent imagery in a relaxed way, the reader is free to drift through the world alongside the characters, rather than being driven by their experiences.

Like the films of Gus van Sant, Raymond’s evocative writing basks in the outdoors, and the overcast skies of Portland feature prominently. Even in those stories not explicitly set in the wilderness, the author deftly includes elements from the outside world. In “The Suckling Pig,” the affluent protagonist is hosting a dinner party that will not only have as its dinner-table centrepiece the beast of the title, but will have as guests the Mexican ‘campesinos’ he (illegally) hires to chop down a dead cedar tree in his yard that serves as a nagging reminder of his recent divorce. One wouldn’t usually invite complete strangers as extra guests to a dinner party but, “a good party always [contains] some minor catastrophe, he believed-a small grease fire, a broken coffee table. In this case, the catastrophe was the guests themselves.”

Another similarity to van Sant’s aesthetic is evident in the stories that have young characters as their central characters – or at least the conceit of reminiscing fondly about a bygone youth. “Warm Bodies” details the misadventures of two department store employees who are locked in a mall overnight, and shares van Sant’s penchant for focussing on the teenaged body, and the first awkward interactions of adolescence. “Benny” is about a man who goes looking for an old high-school friend, only to find that he’s moved on, transformed into an uncaring, senseless drug user.

The book’s cover art perhaps best sums up its unglamorous, quotidian subject matter and the nagging sense of ennui that hides away in its margins. In drab suburbia, two neighbours shout across the street at one another; “Hey Mike, how’s it going?” one asks. “Oh hi John,” says the other. “Things are alright I guess. The average level of imperfection.”

~ by Hugh on March 9, 2009.