From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. These nine gorgeous stories from novelist and screenwriter Raymond find pallid Northwesterners testing the moral perimeters of their decent lives. In The Suckling Pig, set around the preparations for a dinner party, the divorced middle-aged host hires two Mexican men for some yard work at his suburban house, then adds them to the guest list to spur on what turns out to be a transformative and class-blurring evening. The wayward protagonist of Train Choir hopes to make it to Alaska and find work with the fisheries, but she gets caught stealing food for her dog, setting off a chain of mishaps that sinks her deeper into a perverse, solitary rut. In Young Bodies, 17-year-old Russian émigré Kendra sneaks into the store where she works to return the money she'd stolen, only to get locked in the mall for the night with an increasingly unsympathetic co-worker. A sense of fragility pervades these characters' lives, and as the upsets that threaten each of them simmer, Raymond reveals how close failure (and worse) lingers. (Jan.)
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This enticing collection pulses with the intensity of its diverse characters and the affliction that comes part and parcel with decisions, large or small, that they make at life’s junctures. The haunting “Benny” finds a reluctant man returning to his old neighborhood to search for a lost childhood friend, the titular character, as a favor to Benny’s dying father. With “Young Bodies,” two teenagers, Kendra, a Russian emigrant, and Bryan, are locked in a mall overnight after Kendra’s plan to return stolen money goes awry. As the night progresses and inhibitions dissolve, Kendra finds herself slowly, then eagerly testing the limits of her burgeoning sexuality, to uneasy affect. “Train Choir” follows the nomadic Verna, who is traveling to Alaska in hope of finding work at a fishing cannery. Verna’s rash decision to steal food for her dog during a layover in a small Oregon town is her first misstep in a line of many, and her situation increasingly worsens alongside her emotional desperation. Devoid of extraneous narrative, Raymond’s nine stories are delicately refined and sublimely electric. --Leah Strauss
Review
“Like another Raymond--Raymond Carver--Jon Raymond's realism is reflective without being reflexive, trading artifice and the wink-nudge of clever framing for genuine pathos and the organic trajectory of human drama. The stories in Livability feel real because they're believable, and believable because they're never sensational.” ―Metroland
“Raymond is a prose maximalist. Although his characters have difficulty relating to each other, they relate to the reader with unbuttoned, occasionally garrulous, intimacy. To the reader alone, they entrust their memories, thoughts, feelings, landscape descriptions, even as they explain to the reader why these private riches can't be shared with the person closest to them in the story. The cumulative effect of this, extended over nine stories, is to immerse the reader in a varied society of compulsive and fluent interior monologuists, who experience their lives with articulate intensity, but find it uphill work to communicate satisfactorily with their fellow loners.” ―New York Review of Books
“It's that pitch-perfect description of human interaction that gives these stories depth; in the best ones, a rich evocation of setting make them whole.” ―Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Raymond possesses a keen sensitivity…where he succeeds most is in conveying a broad cultural and specific individual ennui, while still managing to retain narrative interest. What marks just about all of these stories is the sympathy with which the author treats his characters, muddling through the gloom in search of better days.” ―Austin Chronicle
“There is a raw immediacy to Raymond's narrative voice. It has a depressive quality that lends credence to his characterizations, which are often about people who are disagreeable, cut off, rough-edged and lost.” ―Denver Post
“[Raymond's] third person limited point of view skims existential drift with delicate precision. Livability's plots are liminal hooks, awash in the overcast Oregon sky.” ―San Francisco Bay Guardian
“Raymond's tales remain as quietly engrossing in their natural, printed habitat as they do upon a screen. They expand the scope of characters from cultural outsiders and lanky ne'er-do-wells to include members of the moneyed upper class, grieving spouses and young boys confronted by "shared torpor and sudden enthusiasms." Comparisons to the self-consciously hardscrabble Northwest of Raymond Carver will certainly be made, but it's the poems of Richard Hugo, born in the Seattle suburb of White Center, to whom these stories feel the most connected. Like Hugo's lovingly practical images of nature and bleak, localized stasis, Raymond's work floats just beside the realm of possibility, often ending as a character is teetering dramatically on the precipice of something. With Raymond, as with Hugo, we glimpse lives in suspension, and the effect, by the book's end, is dizzying.” ―Los Angeles Times
“The lives of the folks in Jon Raymond's Livability are clouded by longing and lit with rare flashes of grace.” ―Vanity Fair
“Jon Raymond is a real find--his work evokes that of the late Raymond Carver, the king of what was once called Kmart fiction. His stories are moving, real and discomfiting.” ―Chicago Tribune (Elizabeth Taylor)
“This enticing collection pulses with the intensity of its diverse characters and the affliction that comes part and parcel with decisions, large or small, that they make at life's junctures. Raymond's nine stories are delicately refined and sublimely electric.” ―Booklist
“Jon Raymond is a master at re-creating those feelings of unease and confusion that arise when relationships are at their most precarious. His artful rendering of life's defining moments reveals how we are all engaged in ceaseless self-evaluation.” ―Bookforum
“Raymond's strength is his sensitivity, his ability to chart minute shifts and nuances… Realism, perceptively delivered.” ―Kirkus
“These nine gorgeous stories from novelist and screenwriter Raymond find pallid Northwesterners testing the moral perimeters of their decent lives.” ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“These stories stick with me and rival my own memories of inertia, isolation and wild invention in the Pacific Northwest. And like real life, they head in one direction but always end up in another. Jon Raymond has an impressive ability to recognize the tales that we all tell ourselves, and then quietly lead us back to reality--excruciatingly familiar and usually rainy.” ―Miranda July, author of No One Belongs Here More Than You
“Raymond's tales remain as quietly engrossing in their natural, printed habitat as they do upon a screen. They expand the scope of characters from cultural outsiders and lanky ne'er-do-wells to include members of the moneyed upper class, grieving spouses and young boys confronted by "shared torpor and sudden enthusiasms." Comparisons to the self-consciously hardscrabble Northwest of Raymond Carver will certainly be made, but it's the poems of Richard Hugo, born in the Seattle suburb of White Center, to whom these stories feel the most connected. Like Hugo's lovingly practical images of nature and bleak, localized stasis, Raymond's work floats just beside the realm of possibility, often ending as a character is teetering dramatically on the precipice of something. With Raymond, as with Hugo, we glimpse lives in suspension, and the effect, by the book's end, is dizzying.” ―Los Angeles Times
“Jon Raymond is a real find--his work evokes that of the late Raymond Carver, the king of what was once called Kmart fiction. His stories are moving, real and discomfiting.” ―Chicago Tribune
“The lives of the folks in Jon Raymond's Livability are clouded by longing and lit with rare flashes of grace.” ―Vanity Fair
“All of these tales by screenwriter and novelist Raymond (The Half-Life) deal with seizing opportunities to reunite with friends, taking a temporary respite from grief, and starting a new life path, among other very human experiences. The author's simple yet elegant writing style, with concise descriptions and well-paced action sequences, is taut and powerful. The characters may seem like ordinary people on the surface, but Raymond explores the depths of their emotions to the core, revealing a deep insight into personal motivation that is impressive in a writer so young. Two of the short stories in this collection were inspiration for the films Old Joy(2006) and Wendy and Lucy, which was released Dec. 10. This collection is highly recommended to all libraries.” ―Library Journal
“This enticing collection pulses with the intensity of its diverse characters and the affliction that comes part and parcel with decisions, large or small, that they make at life's junctures. Raymond's nine stories are delicately refined and sublimely electric.” ―Booklist
“Jon Raymond is a master at re-creating those feelings of unease and confusion that arise when relationships are at their most precarious. His artful rendering of life's defining moments reveals how we are all engaged in ceaseless self-evaluation.” ―Bookforum
“[Raymond's] third person limited point of view skims existential drift with delicate precision. Livability's plots are liminal hooks, awash in the overcast Oregon sky.” ―San Francisco Bay Guardian
About the Author
Jonathan Raymond attended Swarthmore College. He was an editor at Plazm magazine and received his M.F.A. from New School University. He is the author of the novel The Half-Life, and the movies Old Joy and the forthcoming Wendy and Lucy. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon.
