There’s seemingly no mistaking what Jon Raymond’s new novel, God and Sex, is all about. It’s there in the almost laughably direct title, right?

Yes and no.

For those expecting some sprawling doorstop of a Great American Novel grappling with and revealing life’s biggest mysteries and temptations, understand that God and Sex arguably isn’t principally concerned with God or sex. Or at least not solely.

Like many of Raymond’s past novels (including 2004’s The Half-Life and 2022’s Denial) as well as his acclaimed movies with director Kelly Reichardt (including 2019’s First Cow and 2006’s Old Joy), God and Sex traces the friendship between two men: a friendship ultimately resilient enough to overcome broken trust. It’s also the story of a love triangle. Set in Ashland, this is a decidedly post-2020 novel, inspired by that year’s devastating West Coast wildfires. With God and Sex Raymond has also written a book about writing books, told in first person by protagonist Arthur Zinn, an author, tracing the path from ideation to publication.

Yet it is true that God and Sex finds Arthur’s fairly cozy existence shaken and stirred: by clandestine affair, a natural disaster, a seemingly answered prayer, and a final plot twist leading him back to the book’s beginnings: in fellowship.

A few days before Raymond’s conversation with fellow author Justin Taylor at Powell’s City of Books at 7 p.m. this Thursday, Aug. 14, the novelist and screenwriter talked with Oregon ArtsWatch about God and Sex as well as his two decades writing movies and books:

Screenwriting

Brian Libby: In our 2022 conversation, you mentioned ideally always having a book and film in different states of gestation or completion. Are you working on any movies or TV series now? I ask in part because your longtime collaborator, director Kelly Reichardt, has a new movie out (The Mastermind) based on her original screenplay.

Jon Raymond: I’ve been able to just be a cheerleader on Kelly’s new film, and offer my thoughts at different stages. I think it’s been a great experience for her. She and I remain in very close contact all the time; she lives in our neighborhood. And we’re starting to talk about a new possible thing, so hopefully that scratched her itch and now we can get back to our other stuff [Raymond says laughing].

I have had actually a lot of screenplay work in the last few years since Denial was published, which has been great, because actually at this point, it’s sort of my job, and how I pay the mortgage. I’ve been working on a couple things with Todd Haynes, one of which is an adaptation of Trust by Hernán Díaz, which was a really huge book a couple of years ago that won the Pulitzer Prize. It was going be an HBO miniseries, but now we’re bouncing over to Netflix. We are sort of in a legal limbo right now, but that project is ongoing, and Kate Winslet is involved.

Brian Libby: So a reunion with both Haynes and Winslet after HBO’s Mildred Pierce.

Jon Raymond: Exactly. Then I also was working with Todd on a project with Joaquin Phoenix that somewhat infamously blew up [the film was abandoned in 2024, just five days before filming was set to commence]. That one may still be alive with a different actor attached. So it’s not totally dead, either. And then there’s another thing I’m doing that I don’t know if I’m able to disclose yet, but it’s adapting another big book.

Brian Libby: After Denial’s publication you were working on a commissioned adapted screenplay. Has anything come of it?

Jon Raymond: There is a Denial script that is not dead, and has at least one actor attached, and is waiting to hear from another, so that project is in the pipeline.

Brian Libby: You have been successful at original screenplays, adapting your own novels and short stories, as well as adapting others’ books, in addition to writing books. How are those challenges different, and what do they share?

Jon Raymond: Every project ends up being its own weird puzzle. There do end up, I guess, being things that you can apply to other things. Every tool is not only used once. But certainly the gestation and evolution of each of the projects with Kelly has had its own path, both the original screenplays and the adaptations. Particularly when you’re adapting a book, you’re a little bit at the mercy of the material you’ve got. Which is great, actually, because it takes so many questions off the table. You just are a mechanic, in a sense, trying to figure out a certain problem given a certain engine. It’s less personal imaginative investments.

Brian Libby: Denial as well as God and Sex are books I can imagine as movies, because they have a certain brevity, at only about 200-250 pages. So many novels are too big for feature films. The fact that several of the Kelly-directed films were made from your short stories was maybe why they worked so well. Maybe this is also why Denial and God and Sex are fun reads: they’re rich stories, but don’t overstay their welcomes, kind of like good 90-minute movies.  

Jon Raymond: Totally. I think particularly American fiction or literature can have a certain size and complexity, like the great-American-novel idea that things have to be big to be interesting or effective. But short novels are great. Increasingly in our lives, that just seems like more the kind of thing that people can deal with. And yeah, I have often agreed that a short story is really the proper template for a film. But a svelte kind of novel, Denial, for instance, which was really quite short and quite simple, that folded into a screenplay really quite easily.

God and Sex, if I’m given the opportunity to adapt it, will be a little more challenging, because it’s a lot more psychological and there’s a lot more inner stuff going on that’s hard to get on to the screen. No one’s asked me yet, but I don’t know how I would exactly skin that cat.

Brian Libby: Recently I attended a retrospective of filmmaker and curator Matt McCormick, who in the 1990s founded the Peripheral Produce experimental film series. He mentioned that along with now-celebrated artists like Miranda July and Vanessa Renwick, your work was part of those shows. What were your films like?

Jon Raymond: I know Matt very well. In the nineties I was doing a variety of video-based things. First I made a feature with a bunch of friends through cable access. It was actually a really elaborate and insane and ultimately unwatchable feature based on the comic strip Crock. It was sort of in the family of Wizard of Id and BC. Crock was the French Foreign Legion one. So we made this ridiculous French Foreign Legion movie that premiered at the Clinton Street Theater in 1996. Randy Gragg wrote about it for The Oregonian, and afterward we got a cease-and-desist order almost immediately [from Crock’s distributor, King Features Syndicate].

I guess you could say that was a failed project, but it did lead me into doing filmmaking stuff. I was really deeply involved with Matt and the Peripheral Produce scene. I started doing video-art installations, often in the lobbies, and I did videos projected behind bands playing. As your article was talking about, it was a really fertile moment, with people scrapping stuff together in a fun way that I think we all I look very fondly on. I think the nineties in Portland were a special time.

The New Novel

Brian Libby: What was your way in to writing God and Sex? An interest in spirituality, religion and miracles? Or did it start with the love triangle?  You’ve acknowledged a debt to Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair.

Jon Raymond: Some of the theological strands of it probably go back to college, reading certain medieval theologians that I really enjoyed. I was turned on to what is called the apophatic tradition of theology, or negative theology: the idea that the best approach to describing the divine is through a negative attribution rather than positive; that there’s sort of this unknowable center to these kinds of perceptions. That sense of negativity and absence has sort of been kicking around in my mind as a basic religious orientation, which could be seen in Kafka and a lot of different places. That has sort of worked into my fiction and screenwriting in different ways. My dad was a practicing Buddhist. I grew up in a certain West coast, New Age-y kind of environment.

The Graham Greene novel I read in my thirties, and always have found kind of fascinating. There’s a sort of gambit involved in it that is very much the same thing in God and Sex: this idea of a deal with God, a kind of a prayer that is also a contract that goes awry. That sort of plot mechanism has really been mulling in the back of my mind for a long time. Being able to apply my own spiritual musings into this Graham Greene chassis was sort of the idea.

Brian Libby: I kind of chuckled a little bit when I saw the title. God and Sex is both very matter-of-fact — it’s largely what the book is about — but it’s also a bit cheeky, almost like a parody of a book title meant to attract readers (or PR people).

Jon Raymond: My wife [author and teacher Emily Chenoweth] continues to think it’s a terrible title. She thinks it’s just ridiculous. But my editor really liked it. Obviously, the publishing people are like, “Yeah, that’s a great title.” I myself was thinking, “Is this really the title? This is so kind of ludicrous.” But then the longer it went, the more it was like, “Well, that is actually what the book is.” I couldn’t think of a better one, so that ended up being it.

Brian Libby: The title notwithstanding, God and Sex fits into your larger body of work in that it’s about friendship between two men, which is foundational to some of your best movies, like Old Joy and First Cow (adapted from your 2004 book The Half-Life), as well as your recent novels like Denial. In all those examples, there’s something gentle about the male friendships: These characters find some kind of grace even as their relationship is severely tested.

Jon Raymond: The friendship thread has definitely been there from the beginning. Writing my first book, The Half-Life, I had the idea that friendship was sort of an under-examined thing in literature and art. Then interestingly we entered the whole bromance phase of culture, and suddenly friendship was extremely in your face, in a certain way. But I’ve always liked the friendship thread, partly because there is a sort of a politics to it for me, which is that friendship as a model is a relation between equals. It’s not a family relationship where there’s a hierarchy involved, or a romantic relationship where there’s this kind of other imperative. It is really sort of a co-citizenship model. You’re collectively trying to figure something out. And I just find those kinds of problems that friends deal with to be interesting and moving. It really has been a pretty consistent webbing.

In God and Sex, it’s a little troubling for me in a certain sense, because I was setting out to have it be more about a romantic relationship, and I tried to foreground it in different ways. And at moments in the book, it is foregrounded [that way]. But the book is bookended with this male friendship. It’s men who somehow manage to bond over this erasure of this woman between them and that. That’s a structure that makes me a little uncomfortable. But it’s just sort of how this book worked out. I don’t want to give too much away, but this also might in part be an inheritance from the Graham Green pattern.

Brian Libby: This book’s central event is a wildfire ravaging Oregon’s Cascade mountains and forests. It reminded me of a 2020 essay in which you wrote that “we basically nuked the Cascades.” Obviously the whole world experienced upheaval in 2020, and America with the protests after George Floyd’s murder. But here in the West, the wildfires were equally impactful. Could you talk about that latter event as literary inspiration?

Jon Raymond: This is very much a post-2020 book. It was incredibly scarring for me, as for everyone. And yeah, it was exactly that: a cluster of apocalypses that all happened at the same time. Actually, it’s even more than you were saying. It was fascism, too. But it was the pandemic, it was Black Lives Matter and the way that played out here in Portland with street violence for months on end, and then capped by the mega-fires. I feel like we’re going to be grappling with what happened in 2020 for a really long time, in the way people are still talking about 1968. I mean, there are things that happened in 2020 that we still don’t really even understand, I think particularly here in Portland.

The fire in particular, in some perverse way, actually benefited the book. I came to the fire idea because of that moment. There was ample documentation of what a mega-fire is like. The Breitenbush [officially the Lionshead] fire is kind of what this one is patterned on. And so it made that writing a little bit easier, just because there was some source material to figure it out. In the Graham Greene novel, the London Blitz is going on, which provides pretext for the miracle that occurs. To do that in our context and make it a Western forest fire seemed apropos.

Writing and Revising

Brian Libby: Could you talk about your writing and revision process? A few years ago, I remember National Book Award-winning novelist Jesmyn Ward talked about doing 16 drafts of a book before it was published.

Jon Raymond: Actually 16 sounds in some ways minuscule, because with writing on a computer, like, I feel like the revision process is like almost just infinite and ongoing. I wouldn’t even know how to count drafts in a certain sense, because they’re sort of always able to be morphing. And there’s just so much kind of moving things around. I wouldn’t even know where to mark certain revisions as completed. I do come to certain stopping points where I’ll print it out and make notes, and this and that. But even that happens dozens of times during the making of a book. So I have sort of lost sight of what a revision even counts as at this point.

Brian Libby: Did you have to whittle God and Sex down to 241 pages, or was it basically this length from early on?

Jon Raymond: It was always probably aiming for about this. It’s longer than Denial, which was very short. I’m trying to remember. It’s funny. You erase the memory of it all. But the beginning changed a lot, as is often the case. You have to rewrite as the book expands and you realize that you just aren’t setting the table properly at the beginning anymore. The number of chapters changed. Sometimes you realize something is part of the previous chapter or you’re just breaking things in the wrong kind of place. But by and large I think it fell into place pretty simply.

Brian Libby: In the Acknowledgements, you mention your wife, Emily Chenoweth, an “early and late” proofreader of the manuscript. She’s an author and writing teacher; my wife once took one of her novel-writing classes. But you also cite Kelly Reichardt as a proofreader. What role do they and others play in shaping your books?

Jon Raymond: It’s important. I do find it’s kind of shrinking a little bit as I get older, probably just because I’ve worn people out; the thrill is gone this point. And it’s hard to ask people to read an entire draft of something. But there are different stages of that reading process, at an early or late stage. I’ve become adept at creating the parameters for each one.

At a very early phase, yeah, I’ll show it to Emily, or to Kelly or somebody, and I’ll explicitly be telling them, “I’m not really looking for anything except encouragement at this point.” I set the bar really low, like, “Is this horrible, is this obscene, is this an abomination?” And so they’ll say, “No, it’s not an abomination.” And I’m like, “Great. I’ll keep going.”

Then, as things kind of congeal a little bit more, I will give it to someone with a tougher mandate, like, “Okay, give me some actual real feedback now.” That ends up always being incredibly helpful. And sometimes merely asking someone to read something is illuminating, because you just start to feel the humiliation that accompanies that. And you’re like, “Actually, I don’t even need you to read this, like merely asking you to read it has told me that I don’t [want you to], that I see now the problem.”

And then, kind of late in the process, there might be more readings where again I’m giving limited commands. “If you see something fixable, tell me. But I don’t want you unpacking this whole thing at this point.” Now this is a polishing. But all those phases disgorge super-helpful things.

Brian Libby: Last year was the 20^th anniversary of your first novel’s publication. What kind of writer are you compared to then? How are you different and how are you the same?

Jon Raymond: That’s an interesting question. I don’t think I realized how well the writing was actually going with The Half-Life. I mean, it was extremely arduous, and it was engrossing and difficult and all that. But actually when I look back, it moved pretty quickly. I figured it out as I was going. At the time it was quite terrifying, though, because I didn’t know if anyone was going to care, or if it would get published. I was like, “I have no idea if I can even write a book like this. No one I know has ever done this before.”

Now, at least, I’m fairly confident that if I sit here long enough and just concentrate, stuff will eventually gather, knock on wood.

Brian Libby: That reminds me: I liked that God and Sex is also about writing, and that the protagonist is an author. In a Washington Post review I read this morning, the reviewer felt the book only picked up after the plot twists: the love triangle, the apparent miracle. But maybe because I’m a writer too, I enjoyed your, or rather Arthur’s, descriptions of how a book comes together.

Jon Raymond: Good. I feel like this is sort of the [writing] craft book I’ll never write. I was able to put in some of my like thoughts about writing, because obviously, as you’re writing, there’s a lot of meta-thoughts about the process that occur to you, and so that that did wind in there.

Jon Raymond: To me the sort of writing about writing that I’m trying to do has a slightly different angle, because I’ve read plenty of craft books, and I know generally how people often write about writing. This hopefully has its own little slant. I mean, it is a book about writing a book. That is a huge narrative thread. I guess for me the secret of the book, if you will, is that the real miracle is this sort of weird blossoming of a book in this guy’s imagination. It begins from nothing and then becomes an actual text, albeit imaginary. But I was hoping that that process held as much numinous energy, as the quote-unquote miracle that may or may not happen.