Books: A Different Journey

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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.