The Naked and the Dread

His fourth novel, the most autobiographical yet, is now out in the world and David Guterson is wary of being too closely tagged for any resemblance to his fiction.

Photography by Charles Peterson

Sipping coffee in a favorite Bainbridge café, David Guterson confesses that his new book, The Other, is by far the most self-revealing fiction he’s ever written. “Most writers worry about what I would call the nakedness involved in the act of writing,” he says in a thoughtful murmur intermittently drowned out by the espresso machine’s shriek.

Private by nature and extraordinarily reserved in person, he hid behind the third-person narratives East of the Mountains (1999), Our Lady of the Forest (2003) and his first novel, Snow Falling on Cedars (1994), whose readership could populate about nine cities the size of Seattle. “I don’t exist in those stories, they’re separate from me.” But in The Other, written in the first person, “I got to the point where I felt more comfortable exposing myself to the world.”

Like Guterson, Neil Countryman, the narrator of The Other, is an outdoorsy 1974 Roosevelt High graduate who has a few much richer friends, marries young, teaches high school and gradually realizes real life requires relinquishing his generation’s radical critique of society. But Guterson also feels kinship with John William Barry, Neil’s monomaniacally principled best friend in the book. Heir to multimillions, John quits what he snarlingly calls “hamburger world” to become the Hermit of the Hoh — a recluse reveling in 144 inches of rainfall annually and no human contact except with Neil and his wife. “I’m like Neil,” Guterson says, “but in my inner life I hear both voices, Neil’s middle-of-the-road voice and John William’s anger and impulse to withdraw. I hear that, too.”

John William Barry is partly informed by a Roosevelt High classmate of Guterson’s who went mad. “A week after graduation he bludgeoned two old people to death, neighbors, and ended up in Western Washington [mental hospital] for, I guess, the rest of his life. This kind of odd disconnect between what people appear to be and what’s going on inside is not uncommon.”

Guterson knows everyone will compare The Other to Into the Wild, the real-life story of doomed Alaskan hermit Chris McCandless. “It was inevitable. But McCandless is very much in what I would call the mainstream romantic tradition, which includes wanderlust — he wants to move around the world and meet people.” Not Guterson’s hermit. “John William is a morbid Gnostic. He has no romantic impulse. He’s too much of a dark realist to embrace the world the way that Chris McCandless did.”

Guterson’s not a Gnostic — an early Christian sect that said no to life — but his view has darkened with age: he calls his first two books “very Romantic” and the second two post-Romantic. “When I talk to high school students about this book, the metaphor I use is the Matrix films. This guy wakes up to the truth and now he can’t live in the world anymore. There’s no going back. Would you give up your knowledge for more happiness?” Guterson opted for happiness in his own life, cutting a deal with the straight world. But he still thinks John William has a point.

McCandless burned his life savings before heading into the wild. John William bequeaths his $440 million to Neil. This perhaps parallels Guterson’s own windfall: reportedly $1 million for the Snow Falling on Cedars film and more from book sales. “I still remember the first sentence of your review of Our Lady of the Forest,” he tells me. “‘David Guterson doesn’t need more money.’ I don’t need any more and that’s why I didn’t rewrite that book. That’s why I didn’t write, you know, Rain Falling on Pines and then Hail Falling on Maples.” He wrote Cash Falling on Neil Countryman instead.

Guterson’s reaction to modest wealth has a hermitlike purity. He drives an old Subaru, the worst millionaire’s car I ever saw, and sponsors a Guterson Award at the UW. He also founded Field’s End, a foundation for local writers. “I was a high school teacher living on under $30,000 a year,” he recalls, homeschooling four kids (he’s adopted a fifth kid since). “On weekends, in the summer, for ten years I was working on my first novel as a hobby. We didn’t move out of our $325-a-month rental house for, I don’t know, three or four years after Snow Falling on Cedars. Because we were kind of spinning our wheels thinking about what do we want to do?” Guterson wanted to write meticulous novels about morality, the pull of nature and the heart’s deep promptings. So he has.

Possibly the scariest parallel between The Other and Guterson’s life is the character of John William’s mother, whose cruelty and insanity provokes his own. It would be stupid and simplistic to equate Guterson’s mother with this character, so journalists have done so. Guterson carefully says, “My mother was hospitalized a couple of times with mild, temporary mental illness.” She occasionally thought that people wore masks obscuring their true selves — a delusion and, potentially, a useful insight for a writer. “There’s always this sort of blurred line between fiction and reality, you know, and those simple one-to-one correspondences really are too simple.”

Guterson’s mother is not John William’s. On the other hand, he acknowledges, “I know what it’s like to live in a home where one’s mother has been hospitalized. I know how the child feels about that, the confusion, the emotion. I know that and I’m able to bring that to the fiction I’ve created.”

He’s fascinated with the long-term consequences of grief, but Guterson’s family woes are not his characters’. “My grandparents were immigrants from Russia. My mother grew up very lower middle class, even lower class, in Portland. When her parents moved to Seattle, they ran a used clothing store in Pioneer Square. Her mother got hit by a truck and was killed when she was nineteen, you know? I mean the circumstances are just” — he chuckles very softly — “completely different.”

He notes that Neil, John William and the suicidal protagonist of East of the Mountains all lose mothers young. “The absence of a mother at an early age correlates with adult mental illness. If your mother was in one way or another absent, you know, it has an impact on you.”

Guterson now sees himself in terms of his membership in another family: the literary community. He pegs himself as the lapidary, rather than prolific, type. A writer who takes pains over every line. “Somebody like Joyce Carol Oates,” he explains, “she’s flying along, she isn’t going to stop to make a sentence right, ’cause she’s on a roll. Stephen King, the same kind of thing. They’re so pell-mell that individual lines . . . they don’t slow down. Whereas somebody like Joseph O’Neill [Netherland], I’m admiring the beauty in each line.”

People send him lots of books for endorsement. “Ninety-nine times out of a hundred I don’t go much further than the first chapter.” He deplores the “clanky machinery that’s so obvious. Oh, not another person who’s creating character and pushing their plot along! There are very few writers out there who really care about what they’re doing in the artistic sense, you know?”

Guterson still feels at home here on Puget Sound. “In more than one way, it has its own weather — you know, the intellectual weather in Seattle. There’s a group of middle-class male writers who’ve all come of age here — people like Bruce Barcott and Tim Egan. Myself. Seattle boys who are now in midlife, have some distance on their youth and on growing up in Seattle. And are now kind of at the height of their powers.”

Far from being complacent or resigned, he pines to find a remarkable writer who’s new and young. “I really hope that I run into aspiring writers who are going to write something great,” Guterson says. “I guess it’s the teacher in me.”

Wishing Well

At sixteen, Neil Countryman and John William Barry ran side by side. Eventually, to the grownup Countryman’s wonder and regret, their lives took dramatically different paths.

exerpted from The Other by David Guterson

Personally, I’m drawn to the young person with a metaphysical complaint, the one upset by the meaninglessness of life who wants to do something about it urgently. Is there something wrong with that obsession? Let me borrow a sappy phrase that’s richer for being curtailed: Oh, to be young. To still be one’s own hero. To still be untainted, and yearning, without anything muddled yet, toward some ostensibly attainable cosmic goal. That, in a way, was my friend John William, which is not to say he was morally irreproachable. Quite the opposite. He stole things. He threw rocks through windows. He damaged what he could. Yet, if I had to sum him up in a way you would recognize, as someone from your own school, a type, I wouldn’t use the term “juvenile delinquent.” I would call him, instead, the brooder in the back row. The rich kid who hates and loves himself equally. The contrarian who hears his conscience calling in the same way schizophrenics hear voices, so that, for him, there’s no not listening.

A week after losing a Roosevelt High School track meet half-mile race to John William by three-quarters of a stride, I saw him again, this time at Green Lake. I was doing what I often did on Saturdays in high school — running the promenade, and passing every runner I saw until I found one who wanted to race. I looked forward to these episodes of aggression toward strangers, but what I didn’t see was how self-defeating my compulsion was, this looking for someone to lose to. I was doing this when John William ran up alongside me, upright but with hair in his eyes, and said, “Not you again.”

We slowed. There were people pushing strollers, kids feeding ducks, joggers, walkers, and bicyclists. I said, “Are you a fag?”

“No.”

“Just a rich bastard.”

“Let’s race to the bathhouse.”

He picked up his pace, so did I, and we ran grimly, forcing anyone coming toward us out of our way. I lost, and when I’d caught my breath, shortly after he did, I said, “How much did you pay for those shoes?”

We watched girls go by and made comments. We jumped into the lake. John William had dope in his car, which was also full of fast-food wrappers and empty chocolate-milk cartons. We went over to Beth’s Café, bloodshot and reeking, ate like pigs, and then bought two bottles of MD 20/20 at a place on Ravenna Boulevard that didn’t card people. Later that night, John William drove the wrong way down a one-way street. Around two in the morning, we stole onto the grounds of the Seattle Center with the idea of wading in pools there and collecting coins. By day, the center could be crowded with visitors to the Space Needle — that self-consciously futuristic 605-foot tower which, as Seattle’s most popular tourist attraction, presides over the north end of its skyline like a moored UFO — the amusement park, the science exhibits, the Flag Pavilion, or the Monorail, but on this night it was rain-racked and so utterly deserted as to feel menacing. John William and I jogged past the locked-down barker booths with their giant pink teddy bear and faux-feather boa prizes, then stopped to toke by the Food Circus. On our left, the three legs of the Needle held up its rotating restaurant, their surfaces lit from below by floodlights. I told John William that the Needle’s observation deck reminded me of a mushroom, and his answer was “I hate the Space Needle.”

“Me, too.”

“I hate this whole place.”

“So do I.”

We jogged on, passing a closed sno-cone booth and the dark Exhibition Hall, where about twelve years before, at the Century 21 Exposition, I’d taken a simulated space flight in the Spacearium with my parents and Carol. At the pools that John William and I planned to pick clean of change, on the far side of the Flag Pavilion and in the courtyard of the Pacific Science Center, the fountains had all been turned off for the night, but the water surfaces were so roiled by raindrops that the coins below, in wee-hour city light, shimmered like cinematic pirate booty. I have to describe this place not as I think of it now — as a museum I’ve visited with my sons to enhance their appreciation of science (and, on the way out of the exhibits on dinosaurs or computers, to watch them, with paternal sentiment, make wishes and toss pennies) — but as it appeared to me that night, when I was a teen-ager on the cusp of petty crime. Those pools sat under neo-Gothic arches higher than a lot of downtown buildings, arches reminiscent of the flying buttresses I’d seen in photographs of cathedrals. If you live in a place devoid of much architectural interest, such arches can impress you. They impressed me. They might have been something from M. C. Escher in a slightly less hallucinatory mood than usual. Those vaulting, fretted complications full of latticed interstices, and as delicate and stout as whalebone overhead, gave the courtyard of pools an extraterrestrial ambience, or at least the quality of a dreamworld.

Such as it was and I was. I was also cold, rain-soaked, and paranoid, but with John William I waded in, knee-high, and gathered coins. We stuffed our wet jacket pockets and worked like peasants in rice paddies. If you imagine yourself committing this crime, you’ll realize that your field of view is limited to the water immediately below your eyes and to the bottom of the pool, where the coins lie. You don’t notice much other than the positions of coins and the movements of your hands underwater to make retrievals. The truth is that in short duration this sort of harvesting is mesmerizing. If you’re only at it for twenty minutes or so, your back doesn’t hurt and you can enjoy the rhythm, the distorted view through water (and, in this case, the luminous and agitated reflection of those neo-Gothic arches, inverted and foreshortened), and the giddiness of a furtive and illegal act. There’s the further pleasure — not everyone enjoys this, and teen-agers enjoy it more often than adults — of surrendering to being soaked on a rainy night.

But I can’t explain why we were stealing coins at the Seattle Center. It makes no sense to me now, though it must have made sense to me then. I just don’t recall what that logic was, other than to say that, for my part, I was doing something John William wanted to do and, one thing leading to another, I hadn’t dropped out along the way. Maybe it was a little like manna from heaven — this scattered, free money in a deserted public place — and so all the more tantalizing. However it was, we had only an aqueous glow to work by, which meant we bent our heads farther than we might have. Intent like this on our underwater misdemeanors, we were discovered by a uniformed security guard, whom we didn’t notice until he said, to our backs, “Hey, you little long-haired shits, you’re under arrest.”

I wanted to run. We had the natural advantage of being young half-milers, and my impulse was to use it. This guard didn’t appear particularly fit. I don’t remember details other than his muttonchop sideburns and the way he kept his thumbs on his belt like a sheriff in a western, but I do remember feeling he’d have a hard time covering half a mile in two minutes. Granted, we’d be weighed down by watery clothes, but running was still the answer, from my perspective. And so, dropping the coins in my hand, I waded heavily toward a far edge. John William, though, just stood in the pool with a fistful of change while the guard pried open a sheath on his belt, pulled from it one of those giant handheld radios that were state-of-the-art for law enforcement in the seventies, raised it to his lips, and pressed the TALK button. “Base,” he said, and that was when John William threw change in his face, lunged for his knees, and, in pulling him into the water, dislocated his hip — although I shouldn’t say I’m certain about the injury. I just assume his hip was dislocated because the angle of his leg seemed improbable while he splashed and flailed.

We fled in water-logged shoes, and so loaded down by coins they slowed us and made my jacket bounce. I zipped my pockets along the way so as not to leave a trail of change in my wake and followed John William across the Great Northern tracks at Broad Street, and from there into the brush between Elliott Bay Park — now Myrtle Edwards Park — and the railroad bed with its bull rock and broken glass. A lot of Seattleites stand here to watch the city’s Fourth of July fireworks display, but the rest of the year it’s frequented by the transient and destitute, who for decades have rolled out their mildewed sleeping bags in the Scotch broom because no one tells them not to. That’s where we found ourselves. In the high weeds, we lay on our backs to catch our breath and let the rain pelt us. I didn’t feel stoned anymore, and my tide of juvenile adrenaline hadn’t crested — instead, I felt washed out and attentive to fresh dangers. John William, though, had his hands over his face. He was clutching his skull, his fingers in his hair, the heels of his palms against his eye sockets, and I realized that he was crying. I was silenced by it, because none of my friends or cousins cried, and neither did I, in front of people.

“I think I hurt that guy,” John William said, after a while. “Did he hit his head?”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“Did he get out of the water?”

“I don’t know.”

“We should go back,” John William said. “I want to take him to a hospital. I have to apologize.”

“Go ahead, then.”

He cried more, which I waited out by turning away from him.

“Wishing money,” said John William, when he’d composed himself, “is the money little kids throw in the water when they’re wishing they’ll never have to die and everyone will always be happy.”

“I thought of that myself.”

“I always wished everyone could be happy when I was a kid blowing out candles. And for no death.”

“Me, too.”

“Except for my parents. They can be unhappy and die.”

It sounded like something a rich kid would say, and since I didn’t understand it, I didn’t answer.

At the sound end of Elliott Bay Park, under a roof overhang on Pier 70, we saw someone sitting against a creosoted timber, wrapped in a sleeping bag and wearing what looked to be one of those synthetic coonskin caps kids used to get for Christmas — an acne-scarred Indian planted between brown plastic garbage sacks and burlap bags — and when he asked if we could spare some change, we both put all the coins we had into his outstretched coffee tin.