Scott Bradfield
EAST OF THE MOUNTAINS by David Guterson (Bloomsbury)
When 73-year-old retired heart surgeon Ben Givens diagnoses a tumour in his colon, he sets off from his Seattle home intending to exhaust his body doing the things he loves – climbing, hunting birds with his dogs and recalling his recently deceased wife, Rachel. It is an eastern progress which is not simply metaphysical, since Givens doesn’t seek new plateaus of awareness, but only to recall the simple purity of the things he used to know.
If his trip goes as scheduled, he can eventually lie down and fall asleep forever on the summit of the Cascades. And like Hemingway’s leopard at the heights of Kilimanjaro, nobody will ever know how he got there, or what he learned along the way.
Like Buddha or Siddhartha (or even Kerouac’s Sal Paradise) Givens encounters a series of iconic characters en route to salvation. For example, there’s the obliging young hippy couple who pick him up in their lavender-scented Volkswagen van when he drives his car off a slippery road. (They’re “into” marijuana, TM and heli- skiing). Or the property-mad, middle-class coyote-hunter on a dirt-bike.
Or, finally, there’s the hallucinating illegal immigrant, Angel, whom Givens meets in the back of a Greyhound bus while conversing with a chatty grad student about theosophy. For Guterson, salvation is something people find in this world, not in the next. And any purely intellectual pursuit is simply a complicated form of denial.
Like Guterson’s previous novel, the long- running bestseller Snow Falling on Cedars, Givens’s story is set in the rainy mountains of America’s Pacific Northwest, where the vast wilderness often swallows up every effort at reflection. But where early American landscape writers such as James Fenimore Cooper or Washington Irving once sold their stories to Europeans like picture postcards of the places they couldn’t afford to visit, East of the Mountains never takes its readers anywhere they haven’t already been.
In fact, for the most part, it is little more than a Hemingway pastiche writ too large, with lots of hard, objective descriptions of wartime suturing, wilderness trekking and passion among the apple orchards that drag on for 10 to 15 pages at a time, without any sense of progress or momentum.
As if that’s not bad enough, the book suffers from frequent infusions of expository dialogue, in which Givens phones his children and tells them things the reader already knows. (“I crashed the car in Snoqualmie Pass. But I’m fine, I didn’t get injured.” “You crashed your car? Your four-wheel-drive car?” “That’s the one . . .” And so on and so forth.)
Finally, though, all this laconic dialogue and craggy exposition seems designed to argue that the speaking of words is not so meaningful as the living of life, which is certainly a fair point to make. It is equally fair to point out, though, that Guterson has used up too many words making it.