David Guterson's first novel, Snow Falling on Cedars, was a true ensemble piece, in which even a high-stakes murder trial seemed like a judgment passed on the community at large. In his eloquent second novel, however, the author swings dramatically in the opposite direction. East of the Mountains is the tale of a solitary, 73-year-old Seattle widower. A retired heart surgeon, Ben Givens is an old hand at turning isolation to his advantage, both professionally and personally: "When everything human was erased from existence except that narrow antiseptic window through which another's heart could be manipulated--few were as adroit as Dr. Givens."

Now, however, Ben has been dealt a problem entirely beyond his powers of manipulation: a diagnosis of terminal cancer. With just a few months to live, he sets out across the Cascades for a hunting trip, planning to take his own life once he reaches the high desert. A car crash en route puts an initial crimp in this suicide mission. But the ailing surgeon presses onward--and begins a simultaneous journey into the past. Between present-tense episodes, which demonstrate Ben's cranky commitment to his own extinction, we learn about his boyhood in Washington's apple country, his traumatic war experience in the Italian Alps, and the beginning of his vocation.

Guterson narrates the apple-scented idyll of Ben's childhood in a typically low-key manner--and orchards, of course, are seldom the stuff of melodrama. Still, many of his ambling sentences offer miniature lessons in patience and perception: "They rode back all day to the Columbia, traversed it on the Colockum Ferry, and at dusk came into their orchard tired, on empty stomachs, their hats tipped back, to walk the horses between the rows of trees in a silent kind of processional, and Aidan ran his hands over limbs as he passed them with his horse behind him, the limbs trembling in the wake of his passing, and on, then, to the barn." The wartime episodes, however, are less satisfactory. Clearly Guterson has done his research down to the last stray bullet, but there's a second-hand feeling to the material, which seems less a token of Ben's detachment than the author's.

There is, alas, an additional problem. Begin a story with a planned suicide, and there are exactly two possible outcomes. It would be unfair to reveal Ben's fate. But as the forces of life and death yank him one way, then another, Guterson tends to stack the deck--particularly during a bus ride toward the end of the novel, when Ben's fellow passengers appear to have wandered in from a Frank Capra film. Yet East of the Mountains remains a beautifully imagined work, in which the landscape reflects both Ben's desperation and his intermittent delight. And Guterson knows from the start what his protagonist learns in painful increments: that "a neat, uncomplicated end" doesn't exist on either side of the mountains. --James Marcus


Amazon.com Audiobook Review
In fine tones of uncommon resonance, narrator Don Hastings imbues this beautiful story with a level of compassion and understanding rarely matched. His muscular voice and even delivery are especially well suited to the self-sufficient protagonist, a retired and recently widowed heart surgeon whose spreading cancer spurs him to face death on conditions of his own design. "He reminded himself that by dusk of that day, if everything went according to his plan, he would no longer be in this world." With hunting dogs and rifle, the doctor sets out to revisit the mountains of his youth and to finish his life story with the same tactical precision he had used in the operating room. But a series of chance encounters and unexpected relationships force the dying man to change course and embrace the ambiguities of life, which he normally eschewed. The story is extremely well written, and Hastings delivers an exceptionally strong performance, shading the drama with a weighty realism. (Running time: 9 hours, 6 cassettes) --George Laney


From Publishers Weekly
A good and decent man's passage through life as reflected in his memories and his experiences on what he intends to be his last day on earth is the burden of Guterson's (Snow Falling on Cedars) deeply felt, honest and quietly powerful new novel. Dr. Ben Givens, a 73-year-old retired thoracic surgeon in Seattle, has terminal colon cancer, a fact that he has kept from his daughter and grandson. Widowed recently after a loving marriage, he decides to forgo the ordeal of dying in stages, and instead to commit suicide in what will look like an accident during a day of quail hunting in the apple-growing country where he was born. But fate interferes with Ben's plan. His van is wrecked when he runs off a slick road, and he is rescued in the first of several encounters that turn into a two-day ordeal. During the cold October night in the sagebrush desert, the narrative rises to a harrowing crescendo when Ben's two dogs are the victims of a marauding pack of Irish wolfhounds. With subtle symmetry, Guterson uses Ben's darkly picaresque misadventure to provide graceful segues into the events of his past. A series of poignant memories occur in flashback?Ben's mother's death; his tender courting of Rachel, who became his wife; his soul-lacerating experiences in combat in WWII and his life-defining epiphany at an army field hospital in Italy?which chart the growth of a man with a strong sense of humanity and responsibility and a steadfast work ethic. The novel begins slowly, and at first one fears that Guterson's attempt to establish a sense of place will result in a dense recital of geographical names. But his unsparingly direct, beautifully observed and meticulously detailed prose creates an almost palpable atmospheric background. At the end of his journey, Ben achieves an understanding about the meaning of life and the continuity of commitment. Wise and compassionate about the human predicament, Guterson's second novel confirms his talent as a writer who delves into life's moral complexities to arrive at existential truths. Agent, Georges Borchardt. 500,000 first printing; $500,000 ad/promo; Literary Guild main selection; author tour; rights sold to U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Holland, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Denmark; simultaneous release by BDD audio. (Apr.) 1999.Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Mourning his wife's recent passing and facing his rapidly progressing colon cancer, retired surgeon Ben Givens decides on suicide rather than lengthy suffering for himself and his remaining family. After mapping out his demise in a shooting "accident," Ben drives into the mountains of Washington State for a final bird hunt with his Brittany spaniels. Almost immediately his meticulous plans are disrupted. A car accident propels Ben into unexpected physical and emotional terrain, where his subsequent adventures force him to reexamine his convictions about mortality, morality, and identity. Ben's odyssey is told in the controlled yet passionate prose that characterized Guterson's first novel, the acclaimed Snow Falling on Cedars (LJ 8/94). Guterson draws compelling characters and creates a haunting sense of place and of humankind's paradoxical relationship with the natural world; a passage describing a desperate encounter with a pack of Irish wolfhounds compares favorably with the best of Hemingway. Highly recommended.-?Starr E. Smith, Marymount Univ. Lib., Arlington, VACopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Robert Sullivan
When Guterson is at his best, the story and the landscape nearly become one.


Entertainment Weekly, L.S. Klepp
...the prevailing note here, as in Snow Falling on Cedars, is tenderness; Guterson is a master, for instance, at depicting first love. The tenderness in this book occasionally crosses the border into sentimentality.... But Ben is deeply drawn and complexly sympathetic, and if his story, compared with Guterson's first novel, occasionally seems forced and thin around the edges, it's sustained by the same consistent intelligence and moral vision.


The Wall Street Journal, Michael Byers
Mr. Guterson is plainly a skilled and crafty writer of immense gifts, and the various impulses that gave rise to this book are admirable and courageous. It's a difficult thing to make a novel out of an old man's last journey, but here it is.


From AudioFile
The author of SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS serves up another atmospheric tale of the human condition in Washington state, this time with a doctor, Ben, who wants to commit suicide. Through adventures in the present and with flashbacks, we learn about his life and his most important choices. Narrator Don Hastings has a marvelous, deeply resonant voice that sets the mood perfectly. His calm, matter of-fact descriptions of Ben's preparations lure us into the story; then Hastings switches gears and uses a jauntier voice to tell us about love, war and medicine. He alters his pitch only slightly for female voices, correctly focusing on the literature, and reads Guterson's words with authority and meaning. Be warned, though, that the narrator does not announce tape or side numbers it's up to you to remember. R.I.G. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Dr. Ben Givens, retired heart surgeon, is dying. With his beloved wife already dead and the cancer in his colon--a carefully kept secret--growing intolerably painful, he decides on a suicide that will spare his family the burden and himself the suffering of a lingering death. He will go bird hunting with his dogs, traveling from his adult home in Seattle to the Eastern Washington sageland of his youth, and there stage a fatal accident. Though the plan seems simple and straightforward, its execution is delayed, detoured, and finally undermined by encounters that cast his thoughts back to his boyhood, his courtship of his wife, and his experiences in World War II, and by emergencies that force him to act in the present. Life intervenes. It intervenes most tellingly in a migrant worker's trailer at the farthest point in his journey, where Givens must perform a harrowing delivery, resurrecting skills learned decades ago and never practiced. Leaving the trailer at first light, he is struck by the change wrought in the last few hours. "Things looked different now," he realizes, and he returns home not to fight his cancer, but to endure it and to accept his death. It is an acceptance that seems fully earned because Guterson has traced its unsteady progress with extraordinary honesty, skill, and understanding. The author's second novel makes good on the promise of his first, the extravagantly successful Snow Falling on Cedars (1994). Readers who put that book near the top of the best-seller lists will clamor for this one, and they should not be disappointed. With the same general concerns of love, war, and death and the same searching examination of the relationship between past and present, it is leaner, more direct, and altogether more compelling. Dennis Dodge


From Kirkus Reviews
The many admirers of Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars (1994) won't be disappointed by this affecting, often superbly lyrical account of the final hunting trip undertaken by an elderly westerner dying of colon cancer. Echoes of Faulkner's great story ``The Bear'' and even Tolstoy's ``The Death of Ivan Ilyich'' resound throughout the painstakingly detailed description of the journey that 73-year-old Ben Givens plans to end with a suicide arranged to seem his accidental death. He's a retired thoracic surgeon, recently bereft of his wife of 50 years, and a longtime resident of the Washington State wild country where he grew up on his father's ``apple farm.'' Extended memory-flashbacks detail Ben's closeness to his widowed father and elder brother (who would become a WWII casualty), and his idyllic love for sweetheart Rachel, who would serve as an army nurse in France while Ben saw combat duty in Italy, bringing away from the war years both his bride and a commitment to save lives instead of taking them. Guterson juxtaposes these memories against a sequence of experiences that challenge the moribund Ben's resolve to die: he survives the wreck of his car and an attack by coyote-hunting wolfhounds; meets a couple who seem destined to live forever, a compassionate veterinarian, and, later, a tubercular migrant worker, then a girl enduring a dangerous childbirthand learns that his life-giving skills remain unimpaired. The denouement feels both hurried and flat, and its ending uninspiredbut it's rescued time and again by the beauty and clarity of Guterson's prose, a virtuosic blend of crisp declarative sentences and long, seductive, image-filled extended meditative statements. Thinly imagined but quite beautifully writtenand (the nicely named) Ben Givens's appealing integrity and compassion undoubtedly guarantee that his story will be another major popular and critical success. (First printing of 500,000; Literary Guild main selection; $500,000 ad/promo) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Were there no author's name printed on East of the Mountains, fans of the bestselling Snow Falling on Cedars would know within 20 pages that this new novel is also by Pacific Northwest wunderkind David Guterson. Reverent of place, carefully detailed of character, the author's second novel -- his first book was nonfiction, and he has published a collection of stories -- is as deeply felt and minutely evoked as his first. It will likely solidify his reputation as a latter-day old-fashioned writer, the kind of novelist who lovingly and carefully introduces his characters to his readers with the understanding that given enough time, they're sure to get along.

In East of the Mountains we meet Ben Givens, a recently widowed, retired heart surgeon in his 70s. As the book opens, Ben has just has found out that he has terminal colon cancer. Since he's not the kind of guy who allows himself false hope -- he's a doctor, remember -- and even less one who allows himself to be a burden to others, Ben devises a plan. He will have a goodbye dinner with his married daughter and his adult grandson (although they think it's just a regular family meal) and then go off on a central Washington State "hunting trip" -- a trip from which, of course, he will never return. The way Dr. Ben Givens sees it, suicide is not only the most expedient solution to his problem, it's the most moral.

This is a setup that is, of course, begging to be knocked down. (I can't help but think of Alison Lurie's recent The Last Resort, in which a crotchety old man -- in that case, an eminent nature writer -- tries to off himself to spare his family the horror of watching him die.) Is it ever acceptable to kill -- even when death is imminent and the victim is oneself? Even more, when someone has devoted one's whole life to staving off death, can he ever bring himself to cause it?

Knowing what an old-fashioned moralist Guterson is -- his nonfiction book is in praise of home-schooling for kids, after all -- it's hardly surprising that his Ben Givens soon discovers he can't go through with his plan. While Ben is out in the wild, he does a lot of thinking -- much of it about his beloved wife, Rachel, who died just a little over a year before; he recalls their courtship, their lifelong passion, the promises they made to each other (none of which include an acceptance of suicide). And then, Ben meets some real, live folks -- among them a young couple in a van; a drifter who offers strange, elliptical solace; and a pregnant migrant worker who needs Ben to bring her child into the world -- who make him question whether it is yet his time to go.

Those are the bare bones of the parable, but it is the hearty meat Guterson puts on those bones that makes East of the Mountains such a satisfying read. There's a bit of everything here: a boy's wilderness adventure story (except that the boy is a grown-up man), a love story, a saga of aging and missing connections (the scenes in which Givens is offered marijuana by the young couple who pick him up hitchhiking are among the most hilarious -- and most believable -- in the book), a tale of hubris and humility. You don't necessarily like Ben at the beginning -- he's an arrogant doctor know-it-all, you think -- but as he comes to discover hidden depths in himself, you, the reader, do too. There's also a matter-of-factness to Guterson's prose that slowly becomes irresistible and, interestingly, almost poetic in its laconism; it'll be a wonder if Clint Eastwood isn't tapped to play Givens in the film version. ("So why did you change your mind?" an acquaintance asks Givens about his failure to commit suicide. "Cowardice, mainly," Clint-as-Ben will reply: "Try shooting yourself. It isn't easy.")

OK, so maybe the critics will complain that the story takes too long to begin and that once begun, it ties up just a tad too neatly; there was that criticism of Cedars, too. But Guterson has a lovely, head-on way with a description that makes whatever initial wading in you have to do worthwhile. (Try this: "Ben opened his one good eye to a still and empty October morning in a motel room in Quincy, Washington. A nimbus of light, a gray corona, formed a halo at the curtains. The heater fan made a terrible racket. The air smelled of saffron and from the bathroom the toilet sang.") And once you get to know Ben, you'll be as taken with him as are the myriad strangers he encounters on his journey from and back to himself. Guterson fans have been waiting quite a while for a worthy follow-up to the beloved megadebut that was Cedars; East of the Mountains, in more ways than one, will reward them for their patience.

—Sara Nelson

FROM THE PUBLISHER

It is mid-October, 1997, harvest time in the Columbia Basin of central Washington state, a rich apple and pear growing region. Ben Givens, recently widowed, is a retired heart surgeon, once admired for his steadiness of hand, his precision, his endurance. He has terminal colon cancer. While Ben does not readily accept defeat, he is determined to avoid suffering rather than engage it. And so, accompanied by his two hunting dogs, he sets out through the mythic American West-sage deserts, yawning canyons, dusty ranches, vast orchards — on his last hunt.

The main issues for Ben as a doctor had been tactical and so it would be with his death. But he hadn't considered the persuasiveness of memory — the promise he made to his wife Rachel, the love of his life, during World War II. Or life's mystery. On his journey he meets a young couple who are "forever," a drifter offering left-handed advice that might lessen the pain, a veterinarian with a touch only a heart surgeon would recognize, a rancher bent on destruction, a migrant worker who tests Ben's ability to understand. And just when he thinks there is no turning back, nothing to lose that wasn't lost, his power of intervention is called upon and his very identity tested.

Full of humanity, passion, and moral honesty, East of the Mountains is a bold and beautiful novel of personal discovery.

FROM THE CRITICS

Janice Harayda - Salon

Soon everybody will be a potential client of Dr. Jack Kevorkian. The longer we live — and the more we learn about the terrors of end-stage diseases — the more likely it becomes that each of us will think of committing suicide. And novelists may be gentler than juries in judging the decision to end a life.

David Guterson signals his intentions early on in East of the Mountains. Christian theology holds that at the second coming, Christ will arrive from the east, and Guterson is not a man to take his symbols lightly. While more and more novelists have been turning out glib metaphors, Guterson defied the trend in his bestselling Snow Falling on Cedars by using cedars the way writers have used them for centuries: as a symbol of strength and durability. The similarly mythic title East of the Mountains points to a second coming of hope if not of a messiah. And that is what Guterson delivers in this quietly atmospheric novel about a terminally ill doctor who undergoes a kind of rebirth amid the lush apple orchards of the Pacific Northwest.

Ben Givens, a retired Seattle heart surgeon, suffers from metastatic colon cancer and knows too well the indignities that await him, "the bedsores and bone fractures, the bacterial infection from the catheter, the fluid accumulating between his viscera that would have to be expunged through a drainage tube." He knows, too, that there is no heroism in enduring them "but only fear of pain's alternative, the cessation of everything." So he has resolved to end his life amid the remote canyons of the Columbia Basin, making it appear as though he died accidentally on a quail-hunting trip. But his plans quickly start going awry. He meets a drifter who introduces him to the palliative powers of marijuana, a young couple in love who remind him of him and his late wife, and a pack of wolfhounds that mauls one of his dogs so brutally he has to seek help for it. And all these experiences become part of an unexpected journey of self-discovery.

As Guterson tells this meditative and autumnal story, he shows once again that he has a naturalist's eye for botanical detail. But he is better at evoking plants and trees than at filling out his characters. He works hard to invest Givens' ultimate decision with inevitability, but he never quite pulls it off, because the emotional arc of his hero's life keeps disappearing into reverential descriptions of the landscape. Guterson writes so lovingly of apples that East of the Mountains might carry the American Pomological Society's seal of approval. And though there is no small art in conjuring up a memorable Winesap, this gift is a distinctly lesser one than the ability to create characters who will remain vibrant long after the day's headlines about suicide have faded.

John Leonard - Newsday

With amazing grace, this novel becomes a voyage into another kind of American manhood.

Pico Iyer - Time Magazine

A worthy excursion from a deeply serious and accomplished craftsman...a kind of affirmation of open-hearted faith.

David Bahr - Time Out New York

East of the Mountains is a wholesome, all-American tale of war, wilderness and the will to survive—a sort of Jack London lite....Guterson weaves it all seamlessly together, in clean, sometimes fetching prose.

Justin Cronin - The Philadelphia Enquirer