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<\/p>\nTess Pollok interviews Jon Raymond about his new novel, \u201cGod and Sex.\u201d\u200b\u200b <\/p>\n
God and Sex\u200b\u200b by Jon Raymond. Simon & Schuster, 2025. 256 pages.<\/p>\n
JON RAYMOND\u2019S God and Sex reads almost like two stories instead of one. The novel begins with Arthur, a middle-aged novelist of little significance, who finds his passion for life reignited when he begins an affair with his best friend\u2019s wife, a school librarian named Sarah. But just as their secret threatens to rupture her marriage and upend both their lives, a devastating wildfire sweeps through town and burns away this domestic plot. What was initially an intimate portrait of three friends in a regrettable love triangle morphs into a grander philosophical meditation on God, reality, and the power of love and faith. God and Sex is appropriately titled, connecting the delicate tragedy of our own interpersonal lives with the brutal, challenging tragedy of what\u2019s become of our world.<\/p>\n
I spoke with Raymond over Zoom to discuss his reasons for writing the book, his longstanding interest in climate change and New Age spiritualism, and how he drew inspiration from Graham Greene\u2019s The End of the Affair (1951) while writing God and Sex.<\/p>\n
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TESS POLLOK: What made you interested in writing about nature and God?<\/strong><\/p>\n JON RAYMOND: <\/strong>My interest in God dates back to college when I discovered the writings of the fourth-century Greek mystic Dionysius the Areopagite. He\u2019s the progenitor of what people call \u201cnegative theology,\u201d or the apophatic tradition, which is the understanding of God as an unnamable and unknowable nonentity. It\u2019s the idea that the best way of describing God is through non-attribution; he\u2019s not this and he\u2019s not that. It\u2019s a way of thinking that\u2019s been kicking around my head for decades and has found its way into my fiction and screenwriting. I saw this book, God and Sex, as a way of exploring that more directly. Some of it does specifically show up in the book through the mention of figures like Meister Eckhart, Aquinas, and Heidegger. Beyond that, nature has always been a huge presence in my life. I like to think I have the same sense of animism as most people from the West Coast.<\/p>\n I know that Dionysian rituals, like the mystery cults, had a much bigger influence on early Christianity and other Abrahamic religions than many people realize.<\/strong><\/p>\n Exactly. There are undercurrents of Gnostic traditions in a lot of religions. You find it in Sufism, in Zen. This kind of religious thinking is bound up with absence and unknowing.<\/p>\n When do you feel spirituality in your life? How do you engage with spiritual practice?<\/strong><\/p>\n It all feels so embarrassing to talk about! My dad was a practicing Buddhist in a California sort of way. He meditated every morning and struck a little bell. I think his practice of sitting and concentrating every day has had a huge impact on my life as a writer. It\u2019s probably during my writing time that my spiritual practice manifests, if you could call it that. Not that I plug in and just immediately start feeling spiritual feelings, but writing is when I become aware of something numinous.<\/p>\n My parents were involved in several countercultural things. There was a lot of Sufism in my household, a lot of general New Agery. I\u2019m not into organized religion, but at a certain point, I realized that New Age thinking basically is my organized religious tradition. My religious training, as such, has been an amalgamation of West Coast alternative spiritualities.<\/p>\n You poke fun at that West Coast mentality in the book, especially with the \u201cre-greening\u201d characters who are individually restoring a single meadow as a means of fighting climate change. It\u2019s certainly not changing the world like they think it is, but what\u2019s the alternative?<\/strong><\/p>\n That\u2019s my inner monologue all the time. I could sit around hating people and judging them and feeling cynical all day long, but what\u2019s the alternative to that? In the case of those characters in the book, at least they\u2019re involved in doing something productive. They are tending their own little garden. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s a scalable model, but I appreciate people attempting things like that.<\/p>\n The book is inspired by and draws heavily on the plot of Graham Greene\u2019s <\/strong>The End of the Affair<\/strong>. What do you find compelling about Graham Greene? Why were you inspired by that book, specifically?<\/strong><\/p>\n I find Graham Greene really strange. He had a peculiar Catholicism that maybe doesn\u2019t qualify as actual Catholicism\u2014it was more of a personal, heretical set of obsessions that loosely resembled Catholicism. God and Sex follows a similar pattern to that of The End of the Affair: they\u2019re both about a love triangle that culminates in a possible miracle in which one of the lovers is resuscitated from death. But The End of the Affair takes place in London during the Blitz and has a much more corrosive, existentialist tone. He was a dark writer, Greene, which I admire, but it\u2019s not something that I\u2019m as capable of doing. I wanted to migrate the situation presented in The End of the Affair to a setting that had more to do with the West Coast New Age movement that I was describing earlier. Many of the ideas from Greene\u2019s book\u2014forming a personal relationship with God, engaging in magical thinking, questioning fate and reality\u2014seem totally amenable to how people think and act in Southern Oregon. The template of The End of the Affair is very much underneath God and Sex.<\/p>\n What\u2019s so exceptional about Graham Greene\u2019s Catholicism?<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019ve always felt like it mostly had to do with the fact that he was bored. He was trying to create a way of living in which everything around him had a certain dire religious feeling, trying to place himself in some kind of crucible of doubt and faith within the context of his own life. Not that this ever stopped him from doing anything he wanted to do; he was famously an adventure-seeking philanderer and a borderline suicidal character who went out of his way to endanger himself. I just think all of it comes out of how bored he felt.<\/p>\n You\u2019ve written several novels, as well as screenplays. How is one writing process different from the other?<\/strong><\/p>\n On a certain level, they\u2019re very similar. There\u2019s a symbiosis between film and literature going back to the very beginning of film. Film has learned so much of its narrative structure from the novel. The novel writing I do is very focused on scene-making, pacing, and duration, but when I\u2019m writing a screenplay, structure is basically my only concern. When you\u2019re screenwriting, you\u2019re creating an armature that other people are going to come in and paint over and flesh out in different ways. You come up with characters, with scenes and scenarios, but that\u2019s it. Writing a novel is much more work because you have to do everything yourself. You\u2019re the gaffer and the costume department and everything. Writing sentences that flow from one into the next is not necessary with screenwriting. The labor and craftsmanship involved in writing a short story or even a paragraph can be way more than an entire script.<\/p>\n The novel is deeply concerned with climate change, which presents a major point of crisis in the book. I would imagine, given that you live in Oregon and there have been a lot of wildfires there recently, that you\u2019ve had some lived experiences with natural disasters and climate change.<\/strong><\/p>\n Yeah\u20142020 was apocalyptic for a number of reasons, including COVID-19, the rise of fascism, the BLM protests, and wildfires. Portland became this theater of fascist and anti-fascist street fighting for over 100 nights in a row. The megafires capped it all off. The fire that\u2019s described in the book is a fire that actually happened here and left Portland in a giant smoke ball for over a week. That experience triggered not only this book but also my previous book, Denial, which was about a journalist in the future who tracks down a petroleum executive wanted for crimes against life. It\u2019s a Nazi hunter\u2013style story in an ecological, speculative fiction costume. The megafires were a profound experience for me and clearly one that we\u2019re going to experience more and more as time goes on.<\/p>\n Was it an intensive research process? Were you interviewing people involved in fighting the fire, or were you just living in Portland when it happened?<\/strong><\/p>\n I went online to read articles and essays written by firefighters. My neighbor is a firefighter and I ran an early draft by him. The fire wasn\u2019t here in Portland, so I experienced it secondhand. But I knew that for the book, I had to focus on creating a full-on forest fire experience.<\/p>\n I was out in Eastern Oregon with my family a couple of weeks ago and there was just this haze of smoke high in the air. I realized that this is how it\u2019s going to be every year. It\u2019s hard explaining to my kids that it wasn\u2019t always that way. We\u2019ve always had fires, but we never used to have this level of smoke during the late summer and early fall. It\u2019s all insane.<\/p>\n Who\u2019s culpable in the climate crisis?<\/strong><\/p>\n Everyone is and no one is, you know? That\u2019s what my last book was about: assigning blame, the idea of a Nuremberg trial for petroleum executives, a global Green New Deal. We\u2019re all burning gas, we\u2019re all eating meat. It\u2019s a collective failure that\u2019s going on, and rationing the blame is actually pretty complicated. On the other hand, I think sometimes you do need to select someone to be responsible so you can punish them. If everyone is guilty, is no one guilty? I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n As much as the book revolves around climate change, it also revolves around miracles and magical thinking. Do you see a relationship between the two?<\/strong><\/p>\n I would say so. I think we have reached a point with climate change where it\u2019s a daily part of our lives. It\u2019s a thrumming emergency behind everything, and which occasionally shifts into acute catastrophe. In this way, it\u2019s a good backdrop for a story about a mystical current that only occasionally manifests in lived experience. For me, the book was about approaching and describing a miracle in the most realistic terms that I could. If something happened to me that I couldn\u2019t comprehend, how long would it take me to whittle that experience down into something I could understand and live with every day? And for how long would I believe it at all?<\/p>\n There\u2019s a great book by Philip K. Dick called VALIS. There\u2019s a miracle in that book too, although it happens in a much more schizoid manner\u2014but it\u2019s sort of the same question as my book: did this really happen? In VALIS, it\u2019s about a medical problem that no one can understand, and a great, unknowable truth that\u2019s revealed, and then this rabbit hole of is this real, is this not real, what even is reality? Miracles are interesting plot devices for reality-testing in this way. I think we\u2019re engaged, nationally and globally, in a pretty major reassessment of what constitutes reality right now. That\u2019s something I wanted to address, less in a topical political way than in a religious way. Miracles are an interesting way to see what happens when someone\u2019s basic sense of reality is undone.<\/p>\n Ideologically, we\u2019ve had so many mirror reversals over the past 10, 15 years, it\u2019s truly insane. It turns out ideologies are so fungible that you can turn them totally inside out. When Donald Trump started promoting Make America Healthy Again, I was amazed because that\u2019s all the hippie shit my New Age parents were talking about years ago. Why do I find it repugnant when RFK Jr. says things that my mom has said her entire life?<\/p>\n What was the process of writing and editing like for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s just sitting at a desk all day long and you can\u2019t really tell how much time passes. The book took a couple years of active writing. My editor critiqued it initially because he said that if the title was going to be God and Sex, there had to be more sex in it. I liked being prompted to write more salaciously about sex.<\/p>\n How do you relate God to sex?<\/strong><\/p>\n In real life, not that much. But in the book, the title God and Sex is spoken by the protagonist\u2019s mother when she\u2019s on the phone. She\u2019s describing how people commune with the divine, and she says that it\u2019s a much more embodied experience for women; it\u2019s about sex. And for men, it\u2019s more about voices, hearing God and receiving messages from outer space. It\u2019s not something I necessarily believe to be true, but it\u2019s something I heard once that I thought was an interesting idea. It\u2019s a very gendered binary of the divine experience.<\/p>\n You\u2019ve been writing novels for almost 20 years now. Have your obsessions and motivations changed over time, or do you see yourself as being consistently drawn to the same themes?<\/strong><\/p>\n Friendship has always been a big element in my writing. I\u2019ve always felt that friendship was underexamined in literature, even if that\u2019s not actually true. To me, friendship has always been more interesting to examine than family relationships or other kinds of relationships because there\u2019s an equality to it. I also made the decision, a bit arbitrarily, to write in a regionalist mode. I thought it seemed unfashionable and stupid, but it turns out it\u2019s also how a lot of fiction is made. People paying attention to their own neighborhood, their own backyard. That\u2019s led me to think about stories within a certain geography. My film work and fiction feel like they\u2019re in the same universe that way. As I\u2019ve gotten older, history has moved along and my sense of rage has shifted a bit, but the basic posture remains the same.<\/p>\n \u00a4<\/p>\n Jon Raymond is the author of five works of fiction, including the Oregon Book Award\u2013winning story collection Livability (2008) and the Oregon Book Award\u2013nominated novel Denial (2022). As a screenwriter, he has collaborated on numerous films with director Kelly Reichardt, including Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008), and First Cow (2019). He also received an Emmy Award nomination for his screenwriting on the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce (2011) directed by Todd Haynes and starring Kate Winslet. He was the editor of Plazm magazine, associate and contributing editor at Tin House magazine, and a member of the Board of Directors at Literary Arts. His writing has appeared in Zoetrope, Playboy, Tin House, The Village Voice, Artforum, Bookforum, and many other places. He lives in Portland, Oregon.<\/p>\n \u00a4<\/p>\n Featured image: Photo of Jon Raymond by Michael Palmieri.<\/p>\n LARB Contributor<\/p>\n Tess Pollok is a writer and the editor of Animal Blood Magazine. She lives in New York City and Los Angeles.<\/p>\n Share<\/p>\n Copy link to articleLARB Staff Recommendations<\/p>\n Tess Pollok interviews Zoe Dubno about her debut novel, \u201cHappiness and Love.\u201d<\/p>\n\n