Collision of people and place

In "Livability," Jon Raymond's collection of stories, the myriad locales of the Pacific Northwest become characters unto themselves: Portland's roiling urban topography, Oregon's dense forests, the rugged grandeur of the California coast -- all are rendered every bit as evocatively as their inhabitants, and have almost as much agency in Raymond's narratives.

The stories' plots and settings vary wildly; the characters are young and old, rich and poor. But these people are all haunted and impaired -- usually emotionally, sometimes physically -- and they collide against each other messily, their demons and their backgrounds dictating the aftermath for better or, more often, for worse.

That collision is hormonal in "Young Bodies" when the teenage daughter of Russian immigrants gets trapped overnight in a mall with one of her school's popular boys. In "The Wind," the complex social hierarchy among the kids in a neighborhood shifts subtly when two boys square off in a boxing match. The opening story, "Old Joy," finds two men trying to renegotiate their friendship after a long estrangement. After his wife dies suddenly, the protagonist of "The Coast" retreats to a northern California cabin and the arms of an old friend, the affair suffused with both guilt and joy.

Every story also contains some collision between humans and their environment. The boys in "The Wind" scamper through the woods bordering their neighborhood, almost as if acting at the behest of their surroundings. It's fitting that stories set in the Pacific Northwest should use the forest as both setting and metaphor; the two men in "Old Joy" occasionally get disoriented on their camping trip while processing conflicting feelings surrounding their friendship's long history. The story's narrator is acutely aware of the difficulties men sometimes have communicating honestly with each other, the awkward dance of intimacy that results: "We talked about nothing much for a while. We just tried to get something going between us."

It's that pitch-perfect description of human interaction that gives these stories depth; in the best ones, a rich evocation of setting makes them whole. In a moment of clarity just before the boxing match in "The Wind," Joseph, a young boy, gains fleeting but eloquent insight into how environment shapes his experience. "The sunlight on aspen leaves and the smell of blackberries in the late summer heat filled him with nostalgia for the brief past he knew. He wondered if the desolate feeling in his chest would lessen over the years. Perhaps it was just the feeling of childhood itself."

Jake Mohan's writing has been published in City Pages and the Utne Reader. He lives in Minneapolis.