East of the Mountains

East of the Mountains
by David Guterson

East of the Mountains
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Book Summary Information

Author: David Guterson
Reader: Edward Herrmann
Edition: Audio Cassette
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Format: Abridged, Audiobook
Published: 1999-04-20
ISBN: 0000000000
Number of pages: 82
Publisher: Random House Audio
Accessories:

Book Reviews of East of the Mountains

Book Review: Formulaic
Summary: 2 Stars

This book follows a very predictable formula, and therefore, offers no real insights. Here is the Formula:
1. Terminally ill doctor (the doctor part is important to the plot) sets out on a journey to end his life.
2. It is necessary that the author gets him out of his car so he can interact with other people. So there is a car wreck.
3. The assorted people he runs into once he has been extracted from his isolated car, of course, offer him Things to Consider and A Reason to Live.
4. End of story.
The doctor part is necessary because that enables him to do noble, helpful things for his Fellow Man (or Woman), including delivering a baby. This presumably shows him there is still a role for him in life, however long it is.

Ho hum. If only life were really this neat and provided such handy packaged answers to our despair.

Summary of East of the Mountains

Best of the Best. From the award-winning author of "Snow Falling on Cedars" comes the bold and beautiful story of a retired heart surgeon with cancer who heads toward the wooded territory of eastern Washington intending to commit suicide. Along the way, he is sidetracked by a succession of fortuitous events that draws him into an altogether unanticipated journey--and rekindles his appetite for life.
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

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