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A Climate Change Novel That Questions Everything

In God and Sex, Jon Raymond has recontextualized timeless novelistic questions—on faith and love—in an era of environmental collapse.

Orange clouds over the west hills of Portland as the light from the sunset and smoke from historic Oregon wildfires mix over Mt. Calvary Cemetery, 2020.

The Faustian myth warns us against making pacts with the devil. To trade something as invaluable as the soul for wealth, fame, and power, the story goes, is to diminish every facet of our existence, to suck the life out of our very core. But to sacrifice earthly glory, even our banal and temporary possessions—to humble ourselves in the eyes of God—for spiritual favor has been celebrated since the Old Testament and thought to restore, revive, and rejuvenate life. What, though, if your sacrifice provides neither earthly nor spiritual benefits?

Jon Raymond’s novel God and Sex hinges on a pact—a “bargain,” as the protagonist, Arthur, calls it—between him and a higher power. Arthur ventures to the Wy’East Resort in Oregon, where Sarah, the married woman he loves, is spending the next few days on a retreat, to tell her that her husband, Phil, suspects she’s having an affair. A writer who has only ever experienced mediocre book sales but feels on the brink of a bestseller with his new work, Arthur isn’t exactly happy to be giving up precious writing time to make the trip. Returning home, he sees “the fuzz of gray coming over the sky, and the sun going blood-orange,” and his phone alerts him that a forest fire is raging near the retreat. Sarah’s phone goes straight to voicemail numerous times, so he turns around, heading right into the eye of the fire to find her. As he scours the burning forest, he pleads with a God and prays, “I’ll give you the most important thing I can imagine if only you allow her to continue to exist.”

But Arthur can’t leave it at that. “I thought these new words over and over, in different formulations, honing the bargain,” he discloses, as if he can revise, control, and bend the pact to his whims the way he can revise, control, and bend the “Tree Book” he has set out to write and whose composition overlays Raymond’s novel. Or perhaps to revise is to revive. “It was a part of a writer’s job, I believed, to resuscitate,” Arthur asserts. This more self-serving idea about writing is in the service of a book that tries to explore much more: our responsibility in the face of climate change, the relationship between faith and love, and writing’s purpose in times of both global and personal crises.

Arthur has only a cursory knowledge of trees but nonetheless pursues his project with the zeal of a PhD student beginning a dissertation. Before he searches for Sarah in the forest fire, he combs through the website of the local college’s biology department, reads its environmental science newsletter, and clicks through faculty profiles for information and inspiration until he stumbles upon the name Phil French, a “forest ecologist…with a few interesting-sounding publications to his name and some cool class titles.” He writes to Phil and attends his office hours; soon a friendship blossoms, and Phil proves to be full of the knowledge and insights that Arthur needs for his book.

Phil, though, might be too good of a friend to Arthur—always magnanimous, always eager to help, always encouraging, always supportive of his endeavors, even after Phil learns of Arthur’s affair with his wife, Sarah, a librarian. Phil and Arthur live in abstractions—“believe in magic,” as Sarah puts it—attracted to hopefulness and attached to “interesting theories,” but Sarah grounds both men in reality. When they travel to Mount Shasta in Northern California to meet two climate activists, Candy and Merle, for research for Arthur’s book, the men are hooked by “their full spiel” and the “strange histories, odd treatises, obscure manifestos” that have influenced the activists’ larger political project. Sarah is........

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