Book Review: Freebird by Jon Raymond

Reviewed by Daniel Pecchenino

Freebird
A novel by Jon Raymond
Graywolf Press, January 2017
$26.00; 336 pp.
ISBN13: 978-1555977603

About halfway through Jon Raymond’s new novel Freebird, the narrative may appear to be another contemporary family comedy-drama with the expected drug references, intergenerational angst, and upper-middle-class sulking about the tyranny of choice. Yes, floating in the background was the untold story of family patriarch Sam Singer’s time in Nazi concentration camps, but even this trope is something many other novelists have tackled in recent years. But then I realized that Freebird had been lulling me into a sense of disconnection so that it could spectacularly connect all of these free-floating pieces.

Freebird doesn’t rely on a cheap twist, so spoiling some of the major plot points would be an injustice to what Raymond does with the novel’s structure. While many books adopt a counterpunctual approach that alternates between two storylines, and others dance seemingly randomly from one perspective to another, Freebird’s structure is a symmetrical braid, wrapping the experiences of underappreciated Los Angeles city employee Anne Singer, her Navy SEAL brother Ben, and Anne’s just-post-high-school son Aaron around one another, tighter and tighter, until they finally come together in a frayed ending that’s as satisfying as it is genuinely shocking. Freebird contains one of the most moving and not-at-all cheesy depictions of the afterlife I remember reading. Most authors simply don’t go there, but Raymond does. And thank God for that.

But even before the novel’s fantastic last fifty pages, the tightening structure brings the main characters closer to one another. For much of the book, the Singers are people who seem more comfortable not talking to each other. Anne and Aaron are dealing with typical teenage dissatisfaction, as the son looks to fly from his mother’s nest; Ben and Anne can’t seem to get past their radically different ideologies, in spite of the fierce love that being raised together has engendered in them both; and no one can seem to connect with Sam, who remains something of a mystery even at the novel’s close. This last bit of restraint is indicative of Raymond’s approach. While some of Sam’s Holocaust traumas are disclosed in a kind of burst, it’s not exactly an epiphanic moment for Aaron, who is the only Singer there to hear it and fails to record it, in spite of having a video camera with him. Raymond gives us only as much as Sam wants to tell and as Aaron is really capable of processing. “It’s amazing what you forget,” Sam says. Perhaps this resonates with me because it jibes with my own grandfather’s alternatingly blunt, fragmentary, and vivid accounts of life in a Nazi POW camp after he was captured at the Battle of the Bulge. Other readers may want more closure and disclosure. But as the novel frequently reminds us, real life simply doesn’t always provide it, if we even know what it looks like in the first place. Real life also often leaves us dumbstruck about how to communicate hard truths, something Aaron realizes after hearing his grandfather’s tale: “He wanted to tell the world. He had no idea how.”

Near the end of Freebird, Raymond writes of the Singers, “They were not religious people, after all. They were Californians above all else.” To anyone who grew up in California or was drawn here and can’t seem to leave, the joke in this line is a twisted truth. California is a kind of promised land, but one that many people tell themselves they have to escape or avoid because it isn’t real. For Sam Singer, California is an early refuge after the war, but Oakland doesn’t sit well with him. Much to Aaron’s shock, Sam returns to Germany to try and spark a romance that never really got off the ground. When that fails, he ends up back in California, finally settling in the suburbs of Los Angeles. And it’s the suburbs of California that Freebird captures almost perfectly. These non-places like Sun Valley and Dublin, tract housing and business parks limning the border of civilization and the wilderness, are not the Golden Land of myth, and they’re far from sacred spaces. Yet even within these places, the irony in Raymond’s contrasting Californians and the devout is obvious to anyone who lives here. You have to have both a sense of humor and a certain amount of reverence as you pray for your state not to fall into the sea. Freebird ultimately finds the right balance in just about every area, and at the end of the novel, the Singers are still hanging on, as best as they can.

Daniel Pecchenino lives in Hollywood and is an Assistant Professor in the Writing Program at the University of Southern California. He is the Assistant Reviews Editor at the Los Angeles Review, and his poetry and criticism have appeared in Gravel, Two Hawks Quarterly, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and other publications.