Two leading lights of Northwest literature will join each other in conversation Friday at a Deschutes Public Library event being held at the popular High Desert Music Hall in Redmond.

Novelists Jonathan Evison, who keeps a home and a cabin in the Seattle area, and Willy Vlautin, who lives in Scappoose and whose most recent novel is ”The Night Always Comes,” will join each other in conversation. Evison, the author of several books including “Lawn Boy,” “Legends of the North Cascades” and the most recent “Small World,” told GO! the two go back a long way, and have done perhaps as many as 30 such appearances together.

Evison has made headlines lately for challenges to his 2018 book, “Lawn Boy,” in which a character flashes back to a homosexual experience he had in his youth with someone his same age. The first was a parent in Leander, Texas, followed by another complaint in Fairfax, Virginia.

“That one woman in Leander, Texas, posted a TikTok of herself at a school board meeting where she either exhibited a great lack of reading comprehension or willfully mischaracterized a passage in my book to make it sound like it was pedophilia, which clearly it is not,” Evison said.

“Frankly, it’s just a political strawman,” Evison said. “They have to know that these kids have instant access to … porn on their phones, so they’re not really sheltering them from anything.”

When Virginia gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin decided to weigh in, “That’s when it really started to become this political strawman, because then they sort of reframe the argument to rile up the voter base — you know, ‘These woke teachers are trying to keep your voice out of the classroom’ … It’s sort of an insult to the First Amendment because these people would call themselves patriots, yet here they are trying to engage a giant censorship campaign.”

America’s polarization is not something he can escape, even in the Northwest corner of Washington state. Most of his week is spent on affluent Bainbridge Island, along with a couple of days at his writing cabin in the mountains of the Olympic Peninsula.

“Even though Obama won here twice, there’s quite a bit of libertarianism that sort of swung for Trump,” Evison said. “I get a peek of it. Even if I avoid the news cycle, I can feel it. … I don’t recognize this country. It’s been a real blow to my faith in human nature. Seven years ago, if you’d asked me, I would’ve told you that I think 9 out of 10 people are decent.

“Now I’ve been categorically forced to whittle that down to at least 60%,” he added. “So that’s a big hit for your faith in humanity to take.”

Of course, “Small World,” which has been called “a Dickensian saga on a grand American scale,” is the book Evison would prefer to be discussing these days. Comparing it to “Lawn Boy,” he said, “These books are so different on the surface, but really they explore identical themes. They could be companions. They just approach it so differently. One (“Lawn Boy”) has a talk-to-you-like-a-friend, first person, irreverent narrator, and the other is a huge, sweeping historical epic that covers 170 years coast to coast.”

And both ask the same questions, including “Has the American experiment made good on its promises? How well have our institutions fared?” Evison said. “The answer is ‘Not well.’”

Slavery and manifest destiny, for example, “run nothing but bad,” Evison said. “But beneath that is this one beautiful idea about the American experiment that I still cling to, and that’s pluralism. That’s the idea that these people come from all over the world to all these different cultures, and we mix here. I don’t look it as a melting pot so much as I look at it as a tapestry, where we just sort of preserve the things that we like best about a culture. … That’s still a beautiful ideal. That, to me, is at the core of the American ideal and the American experiment.”

What: Authors Willy Vlautin and Jonathan Evison

When: 7 p.m. Friday

Where: High Desert Music Hall, 818 SW Forest Ave., Redmond

Cost: Free

Contact: deschuteslibrary.org or 541-312-1032