PORT ANGELES — Jonathan Evison, author of a best-selling novel about Port Angeles, has a question about those who may come to his reading next Sunday.
“Are they warming up the tar out there for me?” As in preparing to tar and feather him?
The Bainbridge Island writer is only half joking. Evison’s sophomore effort — following his critically acclaimed debut novel All About Lulu — is a 496-page epic titled West of Here, and it paints this town as full of oddballs: from boozy Native Americans to prostitutes to drug-addled youths to Sasquatch hunters.
Evison, who’s been visiting Port Angeles since he was a boy growing up on Bainbridge, takes his readers back and forth through time, into the Olympic Mountains and up and down the Elwha River.
Through the eyes of people living here in 1890 and in 2006, we see the rise and fall of many dreams, two cultures and just one dam.
Although West of Here was spawned by the forthcoming destruction of the two Elwha River dams, Evison opted to boil things down to just one, built by a Thomas Aldwell counterpart named Ethan Thornburgh.
The two became one because “I couldn’t have two central metaphors in the novel,” he said; that would be too much.
Motley cast
But Evison does not, evidently, feel that his large, motley cast of 19th- and 21st-century characters are too many.
He’s cooked up Eva Lambert, Thornburgh’s ex-lover and a proponent of a utopian community a la the Puget Sound Cooperative Colony of 1880s Port Angeles; prostitutes with monikers such as Galloping Gertie and Peaches; a strange-acting Native American boy who wanders like a vapor from town to woods; James Mather, an explorer bent on conquering the Olympic wilderness; and on and on.
And those are just the 1890 crowd.
The 2006 bunch includes the guy on the Bigfoot quest; Curtis, the young, apathetic Klallam kid; Ethan’s descendant, Jared Thornburgh, who manages the fish-packing plant; Hillary Burch, the sustainability advocate; and too many more to fit here.
The Elwha River, the Klallam people, Hollywood Beach, the Bushwhacker Restaurant and the Olympic Mountains all kept their names in West of Here.
Yet Evison dubs Port Angeles Port Bonita because, he said, he wanted to write not a work of journalism but fiction, with ample liberties.
When asked why he picked Bonita — pretty in Spanish — Evison said he was merely looking for a parallel to Angeles, Spanish for angels. That sounds “pretty lofty” for the place, he said.
But “I wanted to paint a pretty picture” of this part of the Peninsula.
So Bonita it is, but it ain’t pretty.
No, the streets are muddy, the bars and brothels busy and the people drunk — either on alcohol or the desire to vanquish the wilderness one way or another.
And Evison, who’s on a book tour that has him talking about West of Here all over the nation, is still reeling a bit from its success.
“If I had pitched this book to anybody, they would have said, ‘See ya, buddy.’ It has 42 points of view; it switches between two eras. They would have thought I was crazy. I thought I was crazy when I wrote it.”
Fortunately for Evison, his agent set up an auction of the manuscript, and five publishers bid on it.
Evison chose Algonquin not because that house offered the most money, but because he believed it would do the best job with his sprawling tale.
History, after all, “is a big, messy thing. My favorite novels are messy; Moby Dick is a mess,” he added.
So Evison populates his story with a big flock of characters, many with counterparts in the other era, to show the connections between past and present.
“I grew up reading John Steinbeck and Mark Twain, writers who really brought regions to life,” he added.
“I wanted to bring the Northwest to life” and show it to the world.
No clinging to facts
Evison said he conducted copious research on Port Angeles, the Klallams and the Olympic Mountains — he camps out here in his motor home for 60 to 100 nights a year — but he did not intend to cling slavishly to facts.
“I didn’t want to write a historical novel; I wanted to write about history . . . I wanted all the little people to tell their stories,” he said.
Most of all, Evison sought to “start a conversation. I wanted history to be ambiguous” in a book whose elements are both historical and mythical.
West of Here gives people plenty to talk about, what with its tale of dam-building, wilderness-exploring and -exploiting, the clash of Native American and non-Native American cultures and the hope for a new and restorative era.
While the novel has in its first month since release been lingering on independent booksellers’ best-seller list as well as The New York Times list, the reviews are mixed. And Evison reads them with relish.
“I want to know what the conversation is; I want to know what I’ve wrought,” he said.
The writer wonders whether there will be “history curmudgeons,” sticklers ready to take him to task for turning Port Angeles’ past “onto its ear,” as he said.
“It’s a town that has had some hard knocks,” Evison said, adding that he’s seen the empty storefronts on the main drag. But “the town seems like a fighter to me; it always has.
“The book is ultimately hopeful,” he added. “This is a hopeful page in history. With the death of the logging industry . . . Port Angeles hasn’t had a hopeful page in a long time.”
And as the Elwha dams come down — removal starts this September — “the eyes of the world are on [the Peninsula],” Evison said.
“Port Angeles is, once again, like a leader. I think it’s really cool.”
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-417-3550 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
