Something about Jon Raymond’s short stories takes hold of you for reasons that aren’t immediately apparent. He thrusts you into the turbulent worlds of his characters by drawing minimalist portraits of their lives at the crux of some kind of trouble.
For example, one story in his new collection, “Livability,” centers on a young girl who is almost destitute and trying to get to Alaska in a beat-up and unreliable car to take a job in a factory.
In another tale, a recently widowed man revisits the vacation spot where he and his wife often made love and tries to summon her memory only to find that he is already drawn to other women. In another enticing story we meet a young man who barely survived a tumultuous adolescence pulled back into a dangerous friendship.
Another compelling piece that seems somewhat autobiographical features an insecure writer who anxiously waits to hear if his screenplay will be green-lighted for production while trying to help his daughter buy shoes.
Raymond’s characters are blurry, they move fast, and they aren’t particularly analytical or introspective but rather trudge through life instinctively without the security of family backup or money or position. They are accustomed to being overlooked and somewhat invisible, even to themselves.
In one particularly engrossing story, “Benny,” a young newly married man named Daryl is asked by his mother to track down an old friend of his as a favor to the friend’s father, who is having trouble finding him.
Daryl and Benny had been friends in high school. Daryl had always held a soft spot in his heart for Benny, who had taken him under his wing when he wasn’t yet fully formed, when he was vulnerable and needy and hungry with the intensity and unbearable loneliness that only adolescence brings.
Daryl remembers Benny’s antics, recalling, “I got to remembering some of the better times we’d had. Benny was a funny guy. The things he did often made no sense, but there was a kind of genius there. I thought about the time he ate the photograph of our friend Eric. He pulled the picture from his pocket and placed it inside the bun of his hamburger and gobbled the whole thing down. What did it mean? I doubt even he knew, but it was hilarious . . . He should have been an artist, I thought. The best parts of him had trouble getting out. Plus, he liked being high too much.”
When Daryl finds Benny still making the rounds at the bars and drug dens they both frequented a few years back, the spellbinding lure of childhood idolization for Daryl has dissipated. He sees before him a rambling, stoned hustler who hits him up for money and hisses when he refuses.
Frustrated, Daryl tries to reignite what he still believes once existed between them, but their talks disintegrate into passive-aggressive sparring sessions, alternating between hostility and empathy.
Raymond is ingenious at showing us the roadblocks men often put before themselves when they try to speak to one another; the fumbled attempts at intimacy followed by spontaneous bursts of laughter and roughhousing with shadows of violence dancing everywhere. But still, Daryl goes home and retreats to his basement, defeated, not wanting to concede that what he and Benny once had might have been less than he originally thought. Because in his memory it had felt like love, the first feelings of love, the most powerful feelings for someone he had ever had.
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.
He doesn’t imbue his characters with a phony majestic state of grace but lays them out for us bare. There is little hope for redemption or spiritual transcendence here, but rather people who are choked up on their own past hurts and resentments. His characters seem to revel in nonrevelation. They are not concerned with how they or anyone else came to be who they are. Rather, they are poisoned by their own entombment.
Elaine Margolin is a freelance book reviewer and essayist in Hewlett, N.Y.
FICTION
Livability, by Jon Raymond, $15
