Considering all the tumult that awaits him in the next few months, David Guterson ought to be ready for a decompression chamber -- anything to relieve the anxiety and dread over the publication of his second novel, East of the Mountains, the successor to his breakaway 1994 bestseller, Snow Falling on Cedars. But judging by his calm words and super-cool demeanor, Guterson isn't suffering even a mild case of pre-publication stress disorder. "I don't feel any apprehension at all," he says.
For the moment, the only thing vaguely troubling Guterson is "menu anxiety" -- whether to order the crab cakes or the avocado shrimp sandwich at the Island Grill, the terminus to a scenic drive across Bainbridge Island, the offshore suburb of Seattle that has been his home for 16 years.
Having just led us on a circuitous tour of Bainbridge, following a route that twists through forests and along the shoreline, Guterson gives the impression he's intimately familiar with every hiking trail, cove and cranny on the island. Over the last few days, Puget Sound has been assailed by fierce rain and wind, a typical February storm. But the clouds and fog have lifted, and the island briefly radiates with winter sunlight, offering luminous postcard panoramas of the Seattle skyline on one side, the Olympic Mountains on the other.
A native Washingtonian, Guterson liberally drew upon Bainbridge's's atmosphere and topography for his fictional composite, San Piedro Island, in Snow Falling on Cedars, which captivated readers with its artful fusion of courtroom drama and interracial romance. But San Piedro was north of Bainbridge, in the San Juan Islands, and its climate was harsher and more tempestuous, socially and environmentally. As millions of readers already know, the novel was unusually rich not just in wintry atmosphere but in character, history, and suspense. Set before and after WW II, it depicted a murder trial, in which a Japanese-American is accused of killing a fellow salmon fisherman.
But in East of the Mountains, which Harcourt Brace will release on April 20, Guterson felt obliged to light out for new -- and drastically different -- territory. "I had really emptied myself of gray skies and rain, green trees, salmon and salt water," he says. As the title suggests, Guterson headed across the Cascade Mountains to the "dry and silent" part of Washington, to the hay fields, vineyards, sagelands and orchards that lie "on the sloping, dark verges" of the Columbia River, a terrain he reconstructs with as much affection and lyric precision as he did the western sector in Snow Falling on Cedars.
Though he was born in Seattle, 43 years ago, and has mostly lived in or near the city, west of the mountains, Guterson considers the Columbia River basin part of his native soil, an extension of home. As a youth, Guterson says, "I'd spent considerable time there bird hunting, hiking and just generally meandering, and I was already in love with the landscape before I started the book."
Like Guterson, the novel's protagonist, Ben Givens, is a Seattle native, a bird-hunter and a hiker, who's equally familiar with the steppes of eastern Washington. But that's about all he has in common with the author. Givens is a 73-year-old heart surgeon, a widower who's dying of colon cancer. Tormented by "the dark logic of the world," Givens heads off into the sagebrush with his two bird dogs and a shotgun. There he plans to end his life quickly and relatively painlessly, in an "act of stoic machismo," which he intends to camouflage as a hunting accident.
But Givens has an unplanned car accident, which leads to enlightening encounters with good and bad Samaritans, among them a dirt biker whose vicious wolfhounds attack Givens's dogs, a veterinarian and assorted drifters and migrant fruit pickers, one of whom is about to have a baby. In the process, Givens's self-destructive journey turns into a psychologically healing and regenerative one, during which he acquires the "mental discipline to find spiritual truth."
Guterson calls himself a philosophical novelist as well as a dedicated storyteller, and he isn't shy about discussing the book's mystical allusions, the allegorical undercurrents that drive Givens's physical and spiritual quest. He laces his lunch conversation with references to Buddhist and existentialist philosophy, and to such writers and thinkers as Tolstoy, Camus, Kafka, Jose Saramago and John Gardner. "Everything's potentially symbolic," he tells PW, "even your crab cakes."
In accepting the PEN/Faulkner award, which he received for Snow Falling on Cedars, Guterson publicly brooded about a "world full of horrible accidents and inexplicable travail...." But in person, he has a resolutely cheerful manner. "The universe is essentially indifferent," the novelist says. "But that d sn't mean we have to be nihilists. Given the reality, I look for the most hopeful, nurturing way to live."
Except for a youthful bump or two, Guterson says he's been able to keep his life and career on a fairly smooth, steadily upward trajectory. The son of a Seattle attorney (who was the model for Nels Gudmundsson, the defense lawyer in Snow Falling on Cedars), Guterson was a poor to indifferent student until he entered the University of Washington in 1974, where he suddenly found himself electrified by learning. "It didn't matter what I took -- physical anthropology, oceanography, logic -- I was enraptured with them all." He was particularly drawn to literature courses, studying Shakespeare, the English Romantic p ts, Jane Austen, Hemingway and Faulkner. But, he says, "it was the Russian writers -- Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Turgenev -- whose view of life I responded to, powerfully."
When he was 21, Guterson began to write his own stories, dozens of them, he says, which he sent to small magazines. "I got lots of rejections, but I was slowly getting published, here or there, in the Seattle Review, the Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner. After Esquire accepted then killed a short story, he packaged 10 of his best stories, and, after a single rejection, placed the book with Harper &Row. A number of pieces in that 1989 collection, titled The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind, weren't very original, Guterson says without apology or regret-influenced by, among others, Raymond Carver, with whom he shared a Pacific Northwest background and a skeletal, naturalistic prose style. "That period of intense derivation is a necessary and inevitable step for a writer," he says. "Eventually you just plain outgrow it. You mature, your sensibilities become refined, you find your own voice."
By the time he started writing Snow Falling on Cedars, Guterson had found his voice, though he hasn't hesitated to acknowledge a debt to Harper Lee's Southern classic about race prejudice and murder, To Kill a Mockingbird.
Midway into the novel, Guterson took time out to write a nonfiction book, Family Matters: Why Home Schooling Makes Sense, based on experiences he and his wife, Robin, had in teaching their four children, now ages 17 to six. The book was commissioned by Alane Salierno Mason at Harcourt Brace after Guterson's article on the subject was published in Harper's magazine. Mason also picked up Snow Falling on Cedars after Harper &Row declined to publish it. To the astonishment of both author and publisher, the novel became a success d'estime, bringing him lavish critical praise and prizes. Though it did surprisingly well in hardcover (80,000 by one semiofficial count), it was the paperback edition that boosted the book into the blockbuster realm, selling at a faster rate than any previous Vintage title, racking up roughly 2.5 million in sales to date. "My two previous books had sold a few thousand copies," Guterson says, "and to expect anything different for Snow Falling on Cedars never entered my head."
Along with the literary recognition came a blizzard of publicity, as journalists fixated on his modest lifestyle and his ruggedly homespun, Hemingwayesque persona. "A thinking man's Grizzly Adams" is how People described him in 1996, when the magazine put him on its list of "the 50 most beautiful people in the world," along with Johnny Depp, Brooke Shields and Brad Pitt. In retrospect, agreeing to appear in the spread was a mistake, Guterson says. "I was devoted to the idea that if it brought the book to the attention of more people, fine. But it sent the wrong message about what my life and work are really about.... My ambitions are only literary."
For all his misgivings, Guterson's celebrityhood is probably unavoidable. He has a movie action-hero's height and bearing. For his outing with PW, he looks as if he's on a break from the logging crew, unshaven and wearing a buffalo-plaid vest, generic plaid shirt over a frayed sweatshirt, moss jeans and weathered boots -- not a stitch of it from Eddie Bauer.
Once his royalties started arriving, Guterson talked about giving up his rented bungalow to build a grander house on the island for his family. But he's been too preoccupied with "the real thread of my life," he indicates, tending to family matters and writing fiction.
The idea that he'd even be tempted to take the money he's earned from Snow Falling on Cedars and pack his family off to sunnier, wealthier pastures both puzzles and annoys Guterson. "I get asked that question a lot," he says, "and I can't understand what people mean by it? Tempted by what? Go where?" Materially speaking, he adds, the money's made his life "a little more comfortable and easy," allowing him to replace his balky '67 Scout with a '95 van, "one where I can turn the key and go."
"But my life has changed enormously in that I'm now able to make a living as a writer rather than a teacher," says Guterson, who had taught English at the local high school since 1984.
Guterson is never reluctant, however, to escape the routine of household chores and sentence construction to research his fiction. For East of the Mountains, he traveled not only to Washington's sage country but to Italy, where he familiarized himself with the Dolomites for an extended World War II flashback. The book's acknowledgments contain not just the customary tributes -- to Drenka Willen, who became his editor after Mason decamped to Norton, and to his agent, Georges Borchardt -- but to those who provided him with necessary expertise in heart surgery, veterinary, birth and shoulder dystocia, and the flora of central Washington.
Guterson's capacity for travel should be put to a marathon test with his 15-city promotion tour for East of the Mountains. He's also involved in a "cross-promotion" for the movie version of Snow Falling on Cedars, which will be released next fall. (Though he didn't write the script, Guterson says he consulted with director Scott Hicks on various drafts and, in his admittedly biased view, the film, starring Max Von Sydow and Ethan Hawke, is "enormously impressive.")
With a first printing of 500,000 copies, roughly 10 times that of Snow Falling on Cedars, Harcourt Brace's hopes for East of the Mountains are not just high but stratospheric. That alone ought to make Guterson feel as if he's at the center of a high-pressure zone. By now, though, he's had enough experience in publishing to realize that his first novel was, as he puts it, "a rare occurrence," like that of E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News and John Irving's The World According to Garp.
If East of the Mountains becomes yet another "unheard-of success," Guterson won't be surprised, or even slightly rattled. "My basic idle is pretty low," he says. "I could get excited. I could get impatient. But I did my job. I wrote the best book I could write. These things are beyond my control now. It may be partly from growing up here, but I feel that I'm at peace with the world."
Blades is a former book editor of the Chicago Tribune and the author of the 1992 novel Small Game.
