Word: guterson
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
Toward the end, Guterson describes a lighthouse room that "smelled of salt water and snow and of the past," and that is very much the aroma of his richly atmospheric novel. Though movie ready in its pacing and narrative vividness, it is also unusually lived in, focused and compassionate. As its title suggests, Snow Falling on Cedars is poised at precisely that point where an elliptical Japanese delicacy meets the woody, unmoving fiber of the Pacific Northwest. Out of that encounter, Guterson has fashioned something haunting and true...