The harsh tone of his new novel has surprised readers who enjoyed 'Snow Falling on Cedars', David Guterson tells Eileen Battersby in Dublin.
Take two novels of the three he has written to date - one a study of lost romance, moral obligation and regret, the other an angry black comedy that appears to subvert the notion of belief - and US writer David Guterson probably sits somewhere in between. Friendly in a remote, slightly distracted way, he gives the impression of being a disciplined dreamer given to pondering long hours on an idea, testing it all the while before finally deciding to believe in it.
Having become famous with his best-selling début, Snow Falling on Cedars (1995), a novel that explored one of the less attractive aspects of the US at war, the racist attacks on Japanese Americans, Guterson has been able to lay low - and write slowly and carefully. Sitting in a Dublin hotel as part of the publicity circus for the publication of his third novel, Our Lady of the Forest, he assesses each question with the detached curiosity of the criminal attorney's son he is - and of the lawyer he could have become, but didn't. The new book is so unlike his first it gives the impression he deliberately sought a new direction. He did. His former lyricism has been replaced by an edgy practicality. It seems to be saying, "this is how people really act". And as Guterson says, "it is also contemporary. It is of our times. This is our society".
Snow Falling on Cedars, as slow-moving and impressionistic as snow fall, strove for a tragic intensity. Most of the characters were sympathetic or at least honourable. It is a book with a tough grandeur, intent on exploring a subject that intrigues Guterson, "the human condition". Love is beaten by the dictates of culture, while the age-long battle over land costs a man his life - or does it? It is heady stuff, justice and circumstantial evidence choreographing a courtroom action drama rooted in the personal stories of people who never had a chance.
Our Lady of the Forest avoids the moral imperatives of his earlier works. His characters are singularly unappealing and the story is a lot nastier - and funnier.
"It is more complex, darker," he says. How about murkier? He considers this. "Yes, murkier. Murky. I like that."
It is also harsher, more aggressive and not particularly likeable. The main characters are not so much concerned with moral issues as straightforward survival at all costs. It is where religion and drugs appear to meet in the middle of crazed desperation. A teenage girl mushroom-picker, whose messed-up life to date has been a litany of petty crime, sex abuse and drugs, believes she has seen the Virgin Mary. That these experiences have taken place in a forest provides Guterson with a fascinating ambiguity: the woods as a place of fear and sanctuary. Forests throughout literature have always been romantic and terrifying. In the European fairytale, woodlands and forests are beautiful, sinister and wonderful settings for mysteries.
Fairytales, however, remain far from the mind when reading Our Lady of the Forest, certainly no fairytale, more a bluntly subversive modern yarn - and obviously the stuff for a movie. Yet however surreal it may sound, the literary influence most obviously presiding over Guterson's latest book is none other than that of the 19th-century master, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
In Ann Holmes, the mushroom-picker, Guterson has created an unlikely if interestingly contemporary variation of Hester Prynne. Ann is corrupt and pure; indeed her entire characterisation comes to rest on a motif of diseased purity. There is also Guterson's use of the word "visionary" to describe her. Each time the reader's eye falls upon the phrase "The Visionary", the authorial irony rings out loud and clear. But then this is a book about ironies, particularly the multiple ironies of faith, the faithful and those who prey on faith and the faithful.
Religious belief is dangerous territory. It is also sensitive. Guterson says he is an agnostic. Religion was never a feature in his life. His father, the criminal attorney, "still practising now in his 70s", and his mother - "she's a student, she likes studying and attends the University of Washington" - are the children of Russian immigrants. For a writer for whom landscape is all-important, he has a vast one in his background, that of the Ukraine. The Russian family were orthodox Jews but Guterson has no experience of this.
"My parents were aggressively committed to assimilation, cultural assimilation," he says. His story is typical of many Americans. Except that Guterson is not on the run from his European past; his parents, as new Americans, had already erased it. Guterson is a philosophical character, although his approach to philosophy owes more to science than it does to God. There are many passages in the novel in which a rag-bag of followers - genuine believers, the curious, apparition sightseers, cynics and the desperate - swarm to the woods in hope of seeing a miracle. No one comes out of this novel looking good. When Guterson says "at moments of crisis, people have always, and continue to, turn to God", he says it with the matter-of-factness of an anthropologist, not the enthusiasm of a missionary.
His writing life developed while a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine, where he would write perhaps one big feature a year. A piece he mentions is an essay on sport and money. It is a fascinating subject and Guterson's thesis is the corrupting influence money has had on sport. With the arrival of big-money sponsorship and prizes, "sport lost its heroism", he says. As expected, our conversation turns to the new film, Seabiscuit, a story full of heroism. Gary Stevens, the real-life jockey-turned-actor who plays "The Ice Man", jockey George Woolf, is a Seattle man and local hero. Guterson agrees that the movie is overwhelmed by the power of the real-life story. He looks thoughtful. This is a man who has never made an idle comment; he sees the importance of things.
As for his stories, complicated, forensically detailed, they are more concerned with issues than simple stories.
"I start with a theme, not character or plot," he says. Place is also important. In Cedars, the landscape is San Piedro island in Puget Sound. In his second novel, East of the Mountains, the landscape is the desert of the American west. In this new book - which readers are either enthusiastic about or, "having liked the earnest lyricism of Snow Falling on Cedars", surprised by its vicious tone - he takes the image of the forest as the ruling motif. Forests, he appears to be saying , are places in which strange things can happen, bodies may be found, lives can be changed. No matter how odd the characters appear, the place takes over.
Sea, sky, forest and mountains have always been a given to Guterson, who lives in Puget Sound. Born in Seattle in May 1956, he looks a good deal younger, even if he sounds his age. A father of four, with sons aged 22, 20 and 18 and a daughter aged 11, he describes his home as a "fun farm" where they grow lavender.
"It's not a commercial crop, we don't cut it or anything," he says. "But it looks nice. We don't have any animals either."
Having decided he would not be an attorney after all, Guterson studied English at the University of Washington, the same institution at which his mother studies and which his sons attend. As a boy in Seattle, a town then regarded as fairly provincial, some 3,000 miles from New York and 1,000 miles from Los Angeles, he knew he was only about 30 minutes from the landscape he loved. Now he lives in it and has the Puget Sound, a magnificent area west of the city, as a source of inspiration.
As for Seattle, if it has not yet, as Guterson puts it, "identified a literature of its own", it has become a major US city as well as an important arts capital.
He says he likes writing non-fiction, and there is something about David Guterson, the man and the writer, that suggests his big bookis yet to come. And when it does, it will start with a theme and be based in reality, not story.
