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Freebird
A page-turning new novel from the author of Livability, winner of the Oregon Book Award The Singers, an all-American family in the California style, are about to lose everything. Anne is a bureaucrat in the Los Angeles Office of Sustainability whose ideals are compromised by a proposal from a venture capitalist seeking to privatize the city’s wastewater. Her brother, Ben, a former Navy SEAL, returns from Afghanistan disillusioned and struggling with PTSD, and starts down a path toward a radical act of violence. And Anne’s teenage son, Aaron, can’t decide if he should go to college or pitch it all and hit the road. They all live inside the long shadow of the Singer patriarch Grandpa Sam, whose untold experience of the Holocaust shapes his family’s moral character to the core. Jon Raymond, screenwriter of the acclaimed films Meek’s Cutoff and Night Moves , combines these narrative threads into a hard-driving story of one family’s moral crisis. In Freebird , Raymond delivers a brilliant, searching novel about death and politics in America today, revealing how the fates of our families are irrevocably tied to the currents of history.
- GenresFiction
336 pages, Hardcover
Published January 3, 2017
6 people are currently reading
896 people want to read
About the author
Jon Raymond
13 books98 followersJonathan Raymond is an American writer living in Portland, Oregon. He is best known for writing the novels The Half-Life and Rain Dragon, and for writing the short stories and screenplays for the films Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy (both directed by Kelly Reichardt). He also wrote the screenplays for Meek's Cutoff and Night Moves, and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy for his writing on the HBO miniseries, Mildred Pierce.
Raymond grew up in Lake Grove, Oregon, attended Lake Oswego High School and graduated from Swarthmore College. He received his MFA from New School University in New York.
Raymond grew up in Lake Grove, Oregon, attended Lake Oswego High School and graduated from Swarthmore College. He received his MFA from New School University in New York.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
August 3, 2025
Sorry I waited so long to read this one. Lots of interwoven characters and there must have been a ton of research to write this.
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October 4, 2018https://www.hcn.org/issues/49.22/cycl...
On grappling with a past shadowed by violence: Two books examine the relationship people have with painful family histories.
by Jenny Shank
High Country News, Dec. 25, 2017, From the print edition
Freebird
Jon Raymond
325 pages, hardcover: $26.
Graywolf Press, 2017.
Idaho
Emily Ruskovich
309 pages, hardcover: $27.
Random House, 2017.
In Idaho, the elegant, contemplative debut novel by Idaho-raised, Boise State assistant professor Emily Ruskovich, two sisters play a game in a meadow. If you “hold a buttercup under someone’s chin” and it “makes a yellow glow,” that indicates the person has a secret. “The chins always glow yellow,” Ruskovich writes. “That’s the trick: There’s always a secret. Everyone has something she doesn’t want told.”
That’s certainly true of the characters in Ruskovich’s novel, as well as in Jon Raymond’s Freebird. Both books are set in the West and explore the aftermath of violence, though they do so in very different families. In Idaho, Ann, a piano teacher in the northern part of the state, tries to unravel the mystery behind her husband Wade’s first wife, Jenny, who had killed her youngest daughter nine years earlier. Her older daughter then fled into the woods, never to be found. Wade suffers from early onset dementia, an affliction that is causing his personality to disintegrate even as it erodes the painful memories Ann is so keen to unearth.
Violence and forgetting are also at the heart of Freebird, the engaging fourth book by Portland, Oregon-based novelist and screenwriter Jon Raymond. The Singer family patriarch, Grandpa Sam, is a Jewish Holocaust survivor who immigrated to Oakland from Poland after his traumatic youth, about which he never speaks. Sam’s daughter, Anne, wants to settle him in a nursing home, but frugal Sam resists, so until a better option appears, Aaron, Anne’s teenage son, looks after him.
Aaron, who lacks direction, is considering eschewing college to bum around Mexico with a buddy. At the same time, he’s touchingly focused on learning about his grandfather’s mysterious past. Meanwhile, Anne, a single mom who works for the Los Angeles Office of Sustainability, uncharacteristically steps into a shady business venture in the hopes of funding Aaron’s education. Her brother, Ben, is an ex-Navy SEAL struggling to reintegrate in society after decades as a soldier, a career he chose partly in response to his father’s awful history.
The novels couldn’t be more different in tone — Idaho is mournful and oblique, while Freebird is forceful and direct, by turns comic and angry. Idaho takes place largely on one remote mountain, while Freebird roams the urban West, often set amid the tangle of California’s highways. Idaho is lulling in its rhythms and gorgeous imagery, while Freebird throws a glass of cold water in its readers’ faces, alerting them to government-sponsored violence and graft. Ben thinks, “This placid American life is not what it seems. It is in fact as fragile as a soap bubble, an aberration of history, and all these people … exist in their comfort only because their world is ringed with far-off sentries.”
As distinct as the two novels are, they both explore how people go on living when their pasts are shadowed by unspeakable violence.
In Ann, Ruskovich has created a striking, open-hearted protagonist, a woman who was not even present during the murder the book cycles around. She first got to know Wade when he started taking piano lessons from her several months before his family tragedy. Their mutual affection grows, and Ann insists on marrying Wade despite his dementia, the same disease that killed his father.
“I could take care of you,” she offers. As Wade’s condition deteriorates, he disciplines Ann as he would one of the dogs he trains for a living, pushing her head down and shouting, “No!” whenever one of her inadvertent actions stirs up a memory connected to his lost family.
Ruskovich’s depiction of Wade’s dementia is the strongest aspect of the book. “Together, Ann and Wade sit on the piano bench,” she writes. “She turns the pages, which every week grow simpler and simpler. One week, he’s playing both hands together. The next week, he struggles on a children’s song, with only his right hand. Slowly, as the weeks go by and the weather turns cold, she turns the pages backward.”
As Ruskovich switches perspectives and jumps around in time, the motivations of some of the characters remain frustratingly murky. There’s never a clear explanation of why Jenny deliberately murdered her child, nor is it clear why everyone in the book walks on eggshells around the now-incarcerated woman, careful not to speak of her crime. When a person does something so horrific, her own feelings are usually the last concern. Which perhaps is Ruskovich’s point — in Idaho, she has concerned herself with the kind of person that society would typically toss away and never think of again. Through her characterization of Ann, Ruskovich has embodied radical love and forgiveness.
Raymond, too, forces us to bear witness to people like Ben, the off-kilter veteran turned soldier-of-fortune, as his actions begin to defy morality and the law. He makes us contemplate the role we’ve all played in creating such damaged veterans.
Both Idaho and Freebird will awaken readers to the painful idea that our lives are shaped by a legacy of violence, no matter who we are.
On grappling with a past shadowed by violence: Two books examine the relationship people have with painful family histories.
by Jenny Shank
High Country News, Dec. 25, 2017, From the print edition
Freebird
Jon Raymond
325 pages, hardcover: $26.
Graywolf Press, 2017.
Idaho
Emily Ruskovich
309 pages, hardcover: $27.
Random House, 2017.
In Idaho, the elegant, contemplative debut novel by Idaho-raised, Boise State assistant professor Emily Ruskovich, two sisters play a game in a meadow. If you “hold a buttercup under someone’s chin” and it “makes a yellow glow,” that indicates the person has a secret. “The chins always glow yellow,” Ruskovich writes. “That’s the trick: There’s always a secret. Everyone has something she doesn’t want told.”
That’s certainly true of the characters in Ruskovich’s novel, as well as in Jon Raymond’s Freebird. Both books are set in the West and explore the aftermath of violence, though they do so in very different families. In Idaho, Ann, a piano teacher in the northern part of the state, tries to unravel the mystery behind her husband Wade’s first wife, Jenny, who had killed her youngest daughter nine years earlier. Her older daughter then fled into the woods, never to be found. Wade suffers from early onset dementia, an affliction that is causing his personality to disintegrate even as it erodes the painful memories Ann is so keen to unearth.
Violence and forgetting are also at the heart of Freebird, the engaging fourth book by Portland, Oregon-based novelist and screenwriter Jon Raymond. The Singer family patriarch, Grandpa Sam, is a Jewish Holocaust survivor who immigrated to Oakland from Poland after his traumatic youth, about which he never speaks. Sam’s daughter, Anne, wants to settle him in a nursing home, but frugal Sam resists, so until a better option appears, Aaron, Anne’s teenage son, looks after him.
Aaron, who lacks direction, is considering eschewing college to bum around Mexico with a buddy. At the same time, he’s touchingly focused on learning about his grandfather’s mysterious past. Meanwhile, Anne, a single mom who works for the Los Angeles Office of Sustainability, uncharacteristically steps into a shady business venture in the hopes of funding Aaron’s education. Her brother, Ben, is an ex-Navy SEAL struggling to reintegrate in society after decades as a soldier, a career he chose partly in response to his father’s awful history.
The novels couldn’t be more different in tone — Idaho is mournful and oblique, while Freebird is forceful and direct, by turns comic and angry. Idaho takes place largely on one remote mountain, while Freebird roams the urban West, often set amid the tangle of California’s highways. Idaho is lulling in its rhythms and gorgeous imagery, while Freebird throws a glass of cold water in its readers’ faces, alerting them to government-sponsored violence and graft. Ben thinks, “This placid American life is not what it seems. It is in fact as fragile as a soap bubble, an aberration of history, and all these people … exist in their comfort only because their world is ringed with far-off sentries.”
As distinct as the two novels are, they both explore how people go on living when their pasts are shadowed by unspeakable violence.
In Ann, Ruskovich has created a striking, open-hearted protagonist, a woman who was not even present during the murder the book cycles around. She first got to know Wade when he started taking piano lessons from her several months before his family tragedy. Their mutual affection grows, and Ann insists on marrying Wade despite his dementia, the same disease that killed his father.
“I could take care of you,” she offers. As Wade’s condition deteriorates, he disciplines Ann as he would one of the dogs he trains for a living, pushing her head down and shouting, “No!” whenever one of her inadvertent actions stirs up a memory connected to his lost family.
Ruskovich’s depiction of Wade’s dementia is the strongest aspect of the book. “Together, Ann and Wade sit on the piano bench,” she writes. “She turns the pages, which every week grow simpler and simpler. One week, he’s playing both hands together. The next week, he struggles on a children’s song, with only his right hand. Slowly, as the weeks go by and the weather turns cold, she turns the pages backward.”
As Ruskovich switches perspectives and jumps around in time, the motivations of some of the characters remain frustratingly murky. There’s never a clear explanation of why Jenny deliberately murdered her child, nor is it clear why everyone in the book walks on eggshells around the now-incarcerated woman, careful not to speak of her crime. When a person does something so horrific, her own feelings are usually the last concern. Which perhaps is Ruskovich’s point — in Idaho, she has concerned herself with the kind of person that society would typically toss away and never think of again. Through her characterization of Ann, Ruskovich has embodied radical love and forgiveness.
Raymond, too, forces us to bear witness to people like Ben, the off-kilter veteran turned soldier-of-fortune, as his actions begin to defy morality and the law. He makes us contemplate the role we’ve all played in creating such damaged veterans.
Both Idaho and Freebird will awaken readers to the painful idea that our lives are shaped by a legacy of violence, no matter who we are.
February 5, 2017
An extraordinary novel that uniquely combines an up-close examination of one family’s life with an exploration of the bigger societal issues that have shaped them. The novel’s point of view shifts between three characters – Anne, who works for a sustainability group for the city of Los Angeles, her brother, Ben, a former Navy SEAL, and her feckless teenage son Aaron. The other key member of the family is Grandpa Sam, Anne and Ben’s father, who is a holocaust survivor. Each family member faces their own unique challenges. Anne, a behind the scenes player for her media-personality boss, is tempted with an opportunity to make it rich by partnering with an entrepreneur who has a plan to corner the waste water market to answer LA’s water shortage, even though he doesn’t yet have at technology to convert the waste water to clean, drinkable water. Ben is a bit lost in civilian life until he hooks onto a plan to cure the world’s evils with a criminal act. Aaron isn’t pursuing college and is debating whether to accept one’s friend offer to room with him in another person’s sunroom or take off on a van tour of Mexico with another friend. The novel is incredibly well written and the characters are well rounded and fully developed. At times, I most identified with Anne’s story as she struggles between the choice of doing good for the world vs. making money for herself. There are incredible insights into how things get done in the political world. At points, the other story lines left me feeling a bit frustrated. It was hard to find any sympathy for Ben’s decision to commit a major crime – though we are given brilliant insights into how someone on such a path would think. Aaron also goes off on a journey with his grandfather to recover a hidden treasure in a long forgotten bank safety deposit box. But the joys in the riches they do discover are short-lived because of their own reckless inability to protect their precious discovery. But during that trip, Aaron finally gets his father to talk about his past and the stories of what the grandfather Sam, and his family endured in the years before the war and during their time in a concentration camp are breathtakingly compelling and heart-wrenching. The final third of the book is remarkable – some incredible action sequences and then the unravelling of all their storylines is tremendously moving.
May 15, 2018
Probably more like 2 1/2 stars. I really liked the story line about Aaron and his elderly, Holocaust survivor grandfather but I couldn't relate/follow the uncle's story line and the mother's story line with the environmental venture capitalist was wacky and underdeveloped. And then just when I was starting to like it more towards the end, the author completely botched the funeral. A traditional Jewish funeral, officiated by a Chabad rabbi, complete with a shomer guarding the body would not occur on a Saturday at 2pm - no way, no how! Also, the gravestone wouldn't be there for the funeral and its unlikely there would be funeral invitations or flower arrangements either. The inaccuracy left a bad taste in my mouth.
February 7, 2017
This was pretty decent, but I felt a disconnect between the characters and some of the things they did. Also kind of felt that the ending was just decided upon rather than happened. Still, it was enjoyable.
May 27, 2017
I'm still on the fence about this one. Definitely some images stick in my mind, and the ending is awesome. But sometimes suspension of disbelief weighed too much, and also I have increasingly high (and perhaps unrealistic) expectations of fiction. Great dialogue.
August 15, 2021
How do I puke into the box where this review goes?
This is a horrible POS that is bad on every level of writing that matters.
The start was slow and nothing grabbed you.
And it kept crawling along until near the end when it just went psycho-nonsense.
The characters were not interesting they just were.
You needed to read the book cover to make any sense of what was happening, not that much of anything really happened at all. Not that mattered for the reader.
Many vague pronouns and some continuity errors along with some bad formatting of chapters made spots hard to follow. One really bad formatting typo made one sentence impossible to figure out until you figured out you needed to fix the typo by penciling in the correction.
A number of technical errors were to be expected in this unplanned stinker.
WAAAY TOO MUCH CURSING and also Blasphemous content. WAAAAAAY too much !!!!!!
Needless sex added nothing of value.
And this pointless POS sure needed some value somewhere.
There was NO plot. The book had no real ending, it just stopped. Well a couple of people got killed off, but so what: and the only remotely interesting story that was woven into this trilogy was left dangling. This was not a novel but just 3 short stories that had some common characters.
This book has to be on the short list for the worst book ever written.
Someone tell Raymond this is not the 1930s and he is not some Hemingway.
The book was clearly pantsed only Jon had no idea how to wrap things up so any of it made any sense. I guess he got tired of just marking time with filler so he stopped.
After endless nothingness the last part got dumber and worse.
This is a horrible POS that is bad on every level of writing that matters.
The start was slow and nothing grabbed you.
And it kept crawling along until near the end when it just went psycho-nonsense.
The characters were not interesting they just were.
You needed to read the book cover to make any sense of what was happening, not that much of anything really happened at all. Not that mattered for the reader.
Many vague pronouns and some continuity errors along with some bad formatting of chapters made spots hard to follow. One really bad formatting typo made one sentence impossible to figure out until you figured out you needed to fix the typo by penciling in the correction.
A number of technical errors were to be expected in this unplanned stinker.
WAAAY TOO MUCH CURSING and also Blasphemous content. WAAAAAAY too much !!!!!!
Needless sex added nothing of value.
And this pointless POS sure needed some value somewhere.
There was NO plot. The book had no real ending, it just stopped. Well a couple of people got killed off, but so what: and the only remotely interesting story that was woven into this trilogy was left dangling. This was not a novel but just 3 short stories that had some common characters.
This book has to be on the short list for the worst book ever written.
Someone tell Raymond this is not the 1930s and he is not some Hemingway.
The book was clearly pantsed only Jon had no idea how to wrap things up so any of it made any sense. I guess he got tired of just marking time with filler so he stopped.
After endless nothingness the last part got dumber and worse.
January 26, 2018
As I was reading this book, I found myself thinking about how many stars I would give it, and it kept changing the longer I read. Early on, I had the book at three stars: it was painfully slow in the beginning, and I'm not a fan of so much description of the surroundings, even when well written (as it was.) Then it inched up to four stars -- the characters grew on me, and I do tend to like interpersonal family sagas, even when not much happens plot-wise. Then, bam! It was at five stars when the plot went from plodding to rocketing. There's a scene at the middle of the book that was so unexpected and so well-written I caught myself literally doing the hold-your-breath thing you do in movies. Alas, it fell back to four stars by the end of the book -- there were some parts of the ending that I thought were way too far-fetched and silly, and others that seemed almost mechanical in their need to wrap up what had been quite a well-crafted and tentacled plot. This seems like a book that a lot of different people with varying reading tastes could enjoy, so unless you can't handle any level of physical violence (there are some gory parts) I could probably recommend it to you.
I received an advance copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
I received an advance copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
December 31, 2023
2.5/5.0
I finally got around to the last of my unread giveaway books, and it was... fine, I guess.
A dysfunctional family with their own branching narratives with their own messages. Even the people with the most noble of intentions can be tempted by charismatic salesmen and the promise of life-changing wealth. Senseless violence only breeds more senseless violence, regardless of who's on the receiving end, and anger blinds you to obvious mistakes. Sometimes treasure hunts end in pain and disappointment.
There were also minor annoyances like narrative threads that felt unresolved and unnecessary detours. I felt like one of the characters was supposed to be the "main" character, but the ending makes me think I was wrong. Raymond also tries to wrap things up in a satisfying way, but I don't feel like they were.
That's just my opinion. I'm more of a genre fiction guy anyway.
I finally got around to the last of my unread giveaway books, and it was... fine, I guess.
A dysfunctional family with their own branching narratives with their own messages. Even the people with the most noble of intentions can be tempted by charismatic salesmen and the promise of life-changing wealth. Senseless violence only breeds more senseless violence, regardless of who's on the receiving end, and anger blinds you to obvious mistakes. Sometimes treasure hunts end in pain and disappointment.
There were also minor annoyances like narrative threads that felt unresolved and unnecessary detours. I felt like one of the characters was supposed to be the "main" character, but the ending makes me think I was wrong. Raymond also tries to wrap things up in a satisfying way, but I don't feel like they were.
That's just my opinion. I'm more of a genre fiction guy anyway.
February 6, 2024
A fan of Jon Raymond’s film work with Kelly Reichardt, this is my first of his novels. I chose this book for its brisk pacing, a decision rewarded by every scene. Yet at the same time I was able to appreciate an abundance of literary craftsmanship down to the sentence. I struggle with the star rating scheme. For me this was a five, but a four as a recommendation for others. It isn’t for everyone.
August 14, 2017
Might help if I knew the music being referred to.
November 9, 2018
Leave it to Jon Raymond to get me to read (and thoroughly enjoy) a book about a sniper and wastewater and a kid with questionable taste in music.
April 28, 2017
Could've used more Skynyrd.
Read
March 23, 2017DNF
February 20, 2017
This book deals with a lot of issues.... lying, cheating, secrets, murder, war, politics and many more. I'll be adding my review to the BooklyBox podcasts that will come out soon! You can check it out there!
March 21, 2025
It was fine. Not my usual type of book I enjoy reading but that’s exactly why I chose it in the first place. Unfortunately it wasn’t terribly interesting. I was hoping for a little more action but honestly it felt like a glimpse into someone’s real life. I think that was the author’s goal but next time I’ll just reach for my journal for a glimpse into someone’s real life.
December 15, 2020
Great novel! Extremely well written. I would even call it literary.
I particularly loved the mockery directed at the smug eco-conscious denizens of our Nation, mindlessly reveling in their absurd quest for artisan products sold to one another like modern day Puritans. Yes, Mr. Raymond, our Portland is a microcosm of Progressive self-righteousness cloaked in an air of religion-worthy haughtiness. Not that the other side of the spectrum is offering a better alternative; in fact, it's much worse.
There was a definite cynicism underlying this entire novel, or at least a questioning of our society's moral compass. I couldn't agree more.
Excellent character development, and an amazing effort put into interweaving the four protagonists' lives for the denouement.
I really loved this book! I don't know why more people don't love it. Maybe it's a Portland thing; you have to live here to get it? Or perhaps people don't like the author poking fun at so many of the beliefs and morals the over-educated and coddled hold so dear to their lives? There's a lot of people taking themselves far too seriously right now, and a little reminder that we're all just ashes and dirt momentarily corporeal best summarizes one of the author's messages for us all. Kind of makes Life short and pointless, but that doesn't mean it can't be rewarding, fulfilling, and lovely, too, right? That's what I believe, and I think the four main characters in this novel reach the same conclusion.
I particularly loved the mockery directed at the smug eco-conscious denizens of our Nation, mindlessly reveling in their absurd quest for artisan products sold to one another like modern day Puritans. Yes, Mr. Raymond, our Portland is a microcosm of Progressive self-righteousness cloaked in an air of religion-worthy haughtiness. Not that the other side of the spectrum is offering a better alternative; in fact, it's much worse.
There was a definite cynicism underlying this entire novel, or at least a questioning of our society's moral compass. I couldn't agree more.
Excellent character development, and an amazing effort put into interweaving the four protagonists' lives for the denouement.
I really loved this book! I don't know why more people don't love it. Maybe it's a Portland thing; you have to live here to get it? Or perhaps people don't like the author poking fun at so many of the beliefs and morals the over-educated and coddled hold so dear to their lives? There's a lot of people taking themselves far too seriously right now, and a little reminder that we're all just ashes and dirt momentarily corporeal best summarizes one of the author's messages for us all. Kind of makes Life short and pointless, but that doesn't mean it can't be rewarding, fulfilling, and lovely, too, right? That's what I believe, and I think the four main characters in this novel reach the same conclusion.
April 28, 2024
It was an odd book. I really liked the part about Aaron and Grandpa Sam. It was fun to see their relationship develop. Both characters seemed real. I liked how Aaron kept trying to pry Grandpa Sam's story out of him. Aaron was trying to decide if he should go to college or goof off in Mexico. He does a lot of growing up at the end of the story.
Aaron's mother, Anne, never really developed into a real person. She was a characture and never seemed real. She loved her brother so much but I never figured out what she loved about him or why.
Her brother Ben, a former Navy SEAL, was delusional and struggling with PTSD. Why did he hate his father? No insight to that.
Aaron's mother, Anne, never really developed into a real person. She was a characture and never seemed real. She loved her brother so much but I never figured out what she loved about him or why.
Her brother Ben, a former Navy SEAL, was delusional and struggling with PTSD. Why did he hate his father? No insight to that.
April 14, 2017
I think Jon Raymond writes beautifully and is a master at creating characters. "Freebird" focuses on the four members of the L.A.-based Singer family. Grandpa Sam, a Polish Holocaust survivor, is aging into a state of senile dependence. Anne, his middle-aged daughter, is caught between a number of moral gray areas, from outsourcing her father's home care to helping an eco-capitalist take control of the city's wastewater. Her brother Ben, recently retired from the Navy SEALs, struggles with PTSD and ideological confusion now that he's back in the civilian world. Finally, Anne's teenage son Aaron is at the crossroads of adulthood, unsure if he should go to college, live a hippie sunporch life, or caravan across Mexico. The novel switches back and forth between Anne, Ben and Aaron's perspectives - creating three parallel but slightly disconnected narratives. All of the characters have their fair share of flaws but Raymond does such a good job of inhabiting their inner psyches that you find a way to empathize with all of them. This was the major strength and appeal of the book.
I did find that Ben's narrative (the most dramatic and far-reaching of the three) felt disjointed from the rest of the book. While I found those chapters interesting, I felt like I kept switching to an entirely different novel when I got to them. Raymond seems at his best writing the more personal and interior-minded stories of Aaron and Anne. I was also a little disappointed by the trajectory of the book and the ending. I was really interested in some other storylines that ended up getting totally consumed by the final climax of the plot. After that climax, the denouement of the novel dragged on too long and became repetitive.
Still, I think there was a lot of really powerful material in this novel and it made me ponder the idea of our personal morality, as well as our shared morality as members of society, and how we choose to acknowledge or ignore that through our lives. Overall I enjoyed this book even though some of the concepts felt a bit unresolved. Find more on Medium @tinaisreading.
I did find that Ben's narrative (the most dramatic and far-reaching of the three) felt disjointed from the rest of the book. While I found those chapters interesting, I felt like I kept switching to an entirely different novel when I got to them. Raymond seems at his best writing the more personal and interior-minded stories of Aaron and Anne. I was also a little disappointed by the trajectory of the book and the ending. I was really interested in some other storylines that ended up getting totally consumed by the final climax of the plot. After that climax, the denouement of the novel dragged on too long and became repetitive.
Still, I think there was a lot of really powerful material in this novel and it made me ponder the idea of our personal morality, as well as our shared morality as members of society, and how we choose to acknowledge or ignore that through our lives. Overall I enjoyed this book even though some of the concepts felt a bit unresolved. Find more on Medium @tinaisreading.
Read
July 3, 2017I really enjoyed Jon Raymond’s Freebird. Raymond’s prose are spectacular and the witty, wonderful thoughts of his characters offer both profound truths and that extra special high you get when a book perfectly articulates a thought or feeling you have felt before. The resonance of living and thinking—it is one of the most beautiful parts of reading. I never had to force myself to finish the novel. In fact, I returned to read it many times, just because Raymond’s prose are so fluid and enjoyable. While the story was very engaging, I felt the author had promised more in terms of character development and narrative scope than what I was left with by the end. That said, I look forward to reading more of Raymond.
A few quotes are below.
“Do you believe in anything? Dr. Salt never asked this question, but it was where the other questions led. On this question, she hated to hazard a guess. Her deepest intuitions went something in the vein of mulch—the beatific dissolve of carbon-based life into organic dirt. Maybe, possibly, it felt good. The dissolve was maybe even a form of ecstasy. Maybe even sexually pleasurable, in a way. Slowly, slowly, the flesh melted into rich earth, gradually growing back into the forms of life, as flowers spreading as pollen in the wind, carried away by honeybees. A tree is water becoming light. The prospect made her want to choose her burial ground very carefully.”
“In the darkness, smelling his own gas, he pondered his dad’s body, the body he now owned. Lying there, invisible to himself he could feel his father’s dimensions. His own ribs, his fingers, his pelvis, all were copies of his dad’s. He could almost feel the cells of his father replicating throughout his body, filling him in, shaping him. Someday his dad was going to climb out of his chest fully reborn. It was so strange, he thought. His dad, a man so unknowable, and unreadable in life, was also so close at hand, nesting inside his very skin. Maybe Ben’s soul itself was a hand-me-down.”
“He ate the bun with his back to the tile, gnawing the bits of dough off the wax paper, watching his fellow passengers arrange across the platform, admiring their silent acceptance of each other’s strangeness. He observed a whole spectrum of small gestures and secret codes passing among them, an encyclopedia of odd clothing choices. He himself would never wear jeans embroidered with giant dragons on the pockets, for instance, but he was so glad that the young Laotian man found them to him liking.”
“She’d been sitting in her chair for forty-five minutes, and thus far she’d managed only to open her email page, and that only in case anyone walked by and doubted her productivity. Not that anyone noticed or cared. Among the many bothersome aspects of her workplace environment, the one truly excellent thing, the thing that kept her clocking in day after day, week after week, was the incredible lack of oversight. Her boss, Susan, was almost never there anymore, too busy off nursing her own minor celebrity as an eco-guru at environmental symposia around the globe. And, since Anne’s job title, assistant to the director of the Bureau of Sustainability, made her neither answerable to anyone else, nor directly responsible for managing anyone else, she lived her days in a gilded cage of benign neglect, free to pursue whatever personal agenda she chose as long as the basic work duties for Susan got done.”
“You get up into the upper echelons of power, Ben had been told, and there are basically two kinds of arrangements: a nice guy surrounded by assholes, or an asshole surrounded by nice guys.”
A few quotes are below.
“Do you believe in anything? Dr. Salt never asked this question, but it was where the other questions led. On this question, she hated to hazard a guess. Her deepest intuitions went something in the vein of mulch—the beatific dissolve of carbon-based life into organic dirt. Maybe, possibly, it felt good. The dissolve was maybe even a form of ecstasy. Maybe even sexually pleasurable, in a way. Slowly, slowly, the flesh melted into rich earth, gradually growing back into the forms of life, as flowers spreading as pollen in the wind, carried away by honeybees. A tree is water becoming light. The prospect made her want to choose her burial ground very carefully.”
“In the darkness, smelling his own gas, he pondered his dad’s body, the body he now owned. Lying there, invisible to himself he could feel his father’s dimensions. His own ribs, his fingers, his pelvis, all were copies of his dad’s. He could almost feel the cells of his father replicating throughout his body, filling him in, shaping him. Someday his dad was going to climb out of his chest fully reborn. It was so strange, he thought. His dad, a man so unknowable, and unreadable in life, was also so close at hand, nesting inside his very skin. Maybe Ben’s soul itself was a hand-me-down.”
“He ate the bun with his back to the tile, gnawing the bits of dough off the wax paper, watching his fellow passengers arrange across the platform, admiring their silent acceptance of each other’s strangeness. He observed a whole spectrum of small gestures and secret codes passing among them, an encyclopedia of odd clothing choices. He himself would never wear jeans embroidered with giant dragons on the pockets, for instance, but he was so glad that the young Laotian man found them to him liking.”
“She’d been sitting in her chair for forty-five minutes, and thus far she’d managed only to open her email page, and that only in case anyone walked by and doubted her productivity. Not that anyone noticed or cared. Among the many bothersome aspects of her workplace environment, the one truly excellent thing, the thing that kept her clocking in day after day, week after week, was the incredible lack of oversight. Her boss, Susan, was almost never there anymore, too busy off nursing her own minor celebrity as an eco-guru at environmental symposia around the globe. And, since Anne’s job title, assistant to the director of the Bureau of Sustainability, made her neither answerable to anyone else, nor directly responsible for managing anyone else, she lived her days in a gilded cage of benign neglect, free to pursue whatever personal agenda she chose as long as the basic work duties for Susan got done.”
“You get up into the upper echelons of power, Ben had been told, and there are basically two kinds of arrangements: a nice guy surrounded by assholes, or an asshole surrounded by nice guys.”
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