When Arthur starts researching his new book about trees, he meets Phil, a hugely helpful resource, who becomes a good friend. Then Arthur meets Phil’s wife, Sarah and the two fall deeply in love.
“God and Sex” ruminates about trees, meditates about love and sex, ponders nature and religion and muses about the process of writing. But when a terrible fire wreaks damage, a miracle occurs. Maybe. Or maybe there’s another explanation. Arthur can’t quite figure it all out. And then the aftershocks of that event give the story a final twist.
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Jon Raymond says his book owes a “heavy debt” to Graham Greene’s “The End of the Affair,” with the love triangle with a woman named Sarah and possibly divine intervention, but he has made the story out of his own ideas on all those subjects he has packed in.
Raymond has written six previous books of fiction as well as screenplays for director Kelly Reichardt, including “Wendy and Lucy” and “Meek’s Cutoff” and he was nominated for an Emmy for his “Mildred Pierce” teleplays. He spoke by video recently from his home in Portland. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. Did you want to write a book about trees, or was that just an outgrowth, so to speak, of the story?
I don’t know that much about trees. I’m not, in any way, a botanist, but I love to stare at trees. It’s weird how much of my time I spend just looking at light falling on trees. I’ve done a fair amount of writing with nature and trees in it because that’s part of the world that I live in. It has been a bad time for trees on the West Coast, but there is a lot of tree literature lately. I did want to talk about living with trees and loving trees.
Saying these things out loud sounds so corny, but it was nice to have Arthur writing about trees, which gave me an arm’s length distance where I didn’t have to rhapsodize about them myself, and they were more off in the distance.
Q. The first line declares that “A book is round.” Then Arthur stumbles into how he wants to start his tale. Was that similar to your experience?
I was really happy with how that line came out, but it did take some false starts. I had sort of assumed the opening scene should be Arthur seeing Sarah for the first time. But it just didn’t work. There’s too much pressure on that scene, and I wasn’t able to sort of pull that off. But I went back to the Graham Greene book, which opens with some throat-clearing about writing a book and that process got knit back into the book. And then it became clear to me that Arthur’s and Phil’s friendship was going to begin and end the book, so it allowed for a more graduated entry and allowed some of my own feelings about writing in.
Q. There’s a lot about Arthur’s feelings about writing. When he’s asked about why he writes, he says it’s to avoid real work. Is that you?
This is the craft book I’ll probably never write, and there are a lot of my own feelings about writing in there. Definitely avoiding real work is an element of it, but it’s also a profound question. My answer is, “What else is there to do?” Especially because I have no talent for playing guitar.
And there are the political and theological reasons one wants to write, and one has objections to certain things or wants to correct the record. There’s no single big bang. You take the opportunities you are given.
Q. Does writing help you connect to other people or does it allow you to isolate and be more selfish, which is up for debate in the book?
I will say both of those things, for sure.
There’s a counterintuitive, possibly Zen reality to writing where your solitude and concentration actually do bring you into communion with other people – you’re meditating about them, thinking about the world you’re in, and recognizing your connection to many different people in many profound ways.
Q. Arthur admires and respects Phil for holding on to what may be false hope, but also Sarah for rejecting the same ideas of false hope. Are you a Phil or Sarah?
I’m more of a Phil, as far as having a kind of unreasonable optimism about how things are going to unfold. You don’t want to depend on good luck or the beneficence of fate, and you want to be properly cynical about things. But you have to kind of ultimately have some sort of belief that things will work out.
Q. The book contemplates love, life, trees and big ideas. Then there’s this wildfire, and it shifts into a breathtaking action sequence. Was it hard shifting gears?
Thankfully, I didn’t think that hard about how weird it was going to be to switch gears. But also, in a tragic and horrible way, it actually is not unrealistic. On the West Coast, this kind of wildfire coming in is just part of our lives. So it doesn’t seem that bizarre. I patterned the fire on an actual one in the Pacific Northwest; I read diaries and articles and I have a neighbor who’s a fireman who read a draft and offered pointers.
Q. Arthur prays in moments of crisis, even as he writes about not believing in God; later, he curses that God he doesn’t believe in. What about you?
I find myself praying at moments, but I don’t know who it’s to or exactly what the strategy is. Just praying and groveling. I don’t know who it’s addressed to or what the deal is, but that is part of my psyche. It’s probably just the luck of my life so far as I haven’t been forced to do the cursing.
Q. But there is something that happens in the book, something which may be supernatural or a miracle … or not.
There was never going to be any clarity about whether whatever controls people exists or cares or acknowledges them. All of the questions about divine intervention come from the apophatic tradition, where it’s about what’s not there. There was never going to be trumpets or harps, just the question of how you characterize
Q. I presume you don’t want to explain definitively what happened. But is it clear in your head, or did you not even want to know for sure?
Bizarrely, I don’t necessarily know what I think. I wanted the book to maintain agnosticism about what happened – it is totally reasonable to whittle down that event in retrospect and explain it by many other methods. My method was to try and never decide, to let the scales remain balanced – for the text to do that, I had to do that myself.
Q. Arthur lists seemingly prosaic miracles – a plum, an oak coming from an acorn – but if all these everyday things are miracles, then are miracles mundane?
Totally. It is an awesome and wondrous universe we live in, and something inexplicably happened that landed us here and it’s hard to walk around with that awareness because it’s a bit much.
But for myself, and I think most people, it hits you pretty regularly, “Whoa, what a crazy world this is.” That sense should be nurtured. It’s a good place to walk around in. Maybe it would make us treat the world a little better.
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