A Different Journey

David Guterson is among the least trendy of writers. The protagonist's mother in Guterson's new novel, East of the Mountains (Harcourt Brace; 277 pages; $25), believes "we know ourselves through the work we do"; she speaks against lowering standards at apple-packing conferences. Guterson, known for his flannel shirts and the home schooling of his four children, was until recently a high school teacher who cited as his inspiration the schoolroom classic To Kill a Mockingbird. But in the midst of this unpresuming existence, his meticulously researched yet crackling debut novel, Snow Falling on Cedars (1994), became one of the fastest-selling literary novels of the decade, moving more than 2.5 million copies in paperback even as it won critical prizes. (The movie version will be released this fall.)

The result is that his modest, strikingly unguarded second novel, a simple story of decency and wandering, has been subjected to the kind of buildup generally reserved for the memoirs of presidential mistresses. Still living in an old house on an island in Puget Sound, Guterson says he felt no pressure from having to live up to his miraculous debut and the succeeding five years of expectations. "I'm scared enough when I sit down to write," he says disarmingly, "that there isn't a lot of extra fright that goes with having a best-selling novel behind me." Besides, East of the Mountains was started before Snow Falling on Cedars had fallen onto nearly every bedside table. Yet the fact remains that bookstores are filled with 500,000 hardbound copies of a novel whose main virtue is its uneventful drift.

Rainwater fresh and palpable as crinoline, East of the Mountains tells the story of Ben Givens, a retired heart surgeon in Seattle who has recently lost his beloved wife of 50 years, Rachel, and has been told he has terminal cancer. Pragmatic to the core, he puts his dogs into his car, collects his father's gun and, on a rainy October morning, sets off toward central Washington to shoot himself. Almost instantly, though, he smashes his car and, surviving by a miracle, finds himself a scary-looking vagabond on the loose. All he has to sustain him are the kindness of strangers and the resources of his spirit and the earth.

As Ben stumbles through the autumn landscape--"the prairie smelled of sage and of the dampness held in the earth"--he goes back in memory to his boyhood days of picking apples, his teenage courtship of Rachel, his service in Italy during World War II. Though the narrative is as vagrant as Snow Falling on Cedars was rooted, Guterson's gift for spinning atmospheric spells has not deserted him, and moment after moment flashes into life with the quick vividness of a photograph: the men in war going out "in mattress covers sewn into snow tunics and in creepers made of tightly knotted rope," the young couple romancing as "the apples hung heavy in the late-day sun, the leaves stirred in the wind." The danger in such textured simplicity, though, is that the book can seem not quite spare enough for parable, yet not quite fleshed out enough for nuanced moral drama.

Its protagonist, in fact, is really the land itself, and Washington State will never have a more loving chronicler than Guterson, a lifelong Seattleite who names every tree and evokes, with arresting grandeur, the sound of a coyote's distant howl, or a boy's delight in rivers and horses. With its old-fashioned words like surcease and travail and its unembarrassed talk of caring, Guterson's story becomes a kind of affirmation of open-hearted faith. Ben sees a mountain goat running, and he "felt poised on the cusp of the world, as close to God as he might ever get, with no place higher but heaven itself."

East of the Mountains is best read, perhaps, as a kind of firelit Steinbeck Western about how a deliberate man learns the virtues of having his plans overturned and comes to embrace a life he'd all but given up on. Some readers may find the novel a little too sweet-spirited and lacking in a strong enough sense of evil to make the triumphs of goodness seem earned. Yet as a response to best-sellerdom, the book--and its author--has the bravery to strike off in a new direction. The intrinsic difficulties of completing a novel, says Guterson, "pose enough problems without letting yourself get distracted by external problems." Nonetheless, the fact remains that if East of the Mountains were coming out under regular circumstances, it would probably be regarded as a worthy excursion from a deeply serious and accomplished craftsman. With a $500,000 marketing budget attached, it may look like a disappointment.