Jon Raymond's "Freebird" Centers on the Health of Both the Environment and the Modern Family, And Likes a Good Dick Joke

Like a lot of native Portlanders, author Jon Raymond knows better than to find his city quaint. “I know about all your secret lynchings, even if you don’t know about them yourselves,” Anne says when she visits Portland in Raymond’s new novel, Freebird (Graywolf Press, 336 pages, $26). “The scrupulous curation of the room, of the whole town, felt like a form of ethnic cleansing.”