The Half-Life: Summary and book reviews of The Half-Life by Jonathan Raymond, plus links to an excerpt from The Half-Life and a biography of Jonathan Raymond.
The Half-Life
by Jonathan Raymond
Hardcover: May 2004,
355 pages.
Paperback: May 2005,
384 pages.
A dazzling debut novel about two friendships separated by generations but bound together by a dark mystery.
Cookie Figowitz is the cook for a party of volatile fur trappers trekking through the Oregon Territory in the 1820s, desperate to find their way to the newly created Hudson Bay Company before their meager supplies run out. As he forages for food one evening with the hopes of placating the increasingly restless men, Cookie stumbles over Henry Brown, a man on the run from violent Russians looking to settle an old score. Cookie takes Henry in, hiding him from the trappers, and the two begin an unlikely friendship that will take them from the virgin territory of the West all the way to China and back again.
Tina Plank is a teenager who has been unhappily transplanted to a Pacific Northwest commune in the 1980s. The only other girl her age within five miles is Trixie Volterra, whose troubled past only adds to her allure. Thrown together by circumstance, the two become fast friends, and are soon hard at work trying to make an elaborate movie on a shoestring budget. When, in the midst of filming, two skeletons are unearthed on the property, the lives of Cookie and Henry, Tina and Trixie converge in unexpected, startling ways.
The Half-Life, with extraordinary power and grace, reveals the pleasures and heartaches that bind us to one another.
Vanity Fair
In Jonathan Raymond's marvelous debut novel, The Half-Life, two teenage girls living on a commune in the Pacific Northwest discover a pair of skeletons, unearthing a mystery as rich as the history of the Oregon Territory itself.
Kirkus Reviews
Raymond's impressive debut lays out stories linked by shared ground near Portland, Oregon..... Unglamorous and sad, but compelling.
Publisher's Weekly
Friendship is the theme of this ambitious and assured debut novel...When tragedy strikes for both sets of friends, it feels as natural as the landscape, surely and deftly closing Raymond's circle of ambiguity, loss, loyalties and love.
Booklist
Raymond, in his first novel, seamlessly links the two narratives with elegant and often haunting prose. The characters are finely drawn, and Raymond poses them against a seductively beautiful landscape. The dramatic tension is well managed, and the unfolding stories are emotionally stirring. Raymond is clearly a writer of enormous promise.
Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Confessions of Max Tivoli
Jonathan Raymond is a marvel; The Half-Life is both extraordinarily beautiful and impossible to put down. Wise to the crossed wires of history, to the urgencies of friendship and love, Raymond's novel is not to be missed.
Todd Haynes, director of Far from Heaven
A hugely engrossing excavation of history and friendship, The Half-Life is a debut novel of astounding perception and breadth. Unlocking two stories from the black-shadow mystery of the Pacific Northwest, Raymond deftly melds past and present, the exotic and colloquial, the panoramic and the internal, to illuminate the inherent frailty of being human and our universal longing to connect.
Jeffrey Lent, author of In the Fall and Lost Nation
With The Half-Life Jonathan Raymond has achieved a remarkable debut—a novel of great accomplishment and lyric dimensions. The two tales upon which the narrative is strung weave effortlessly together, sending the reader not on two but multiple journeys through the fabric of life, the nature of human endeavor and a profound and moving meditation on the frailties and strengths of the heart. A wonderful novel, most strongly recommended.
A sweeping portrait of the era of the Californian Gold Rush, a story rich in character, history, violence, and compassion.
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Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Confessions of Max Tivoli
