East of the Mountains by David Guterson

Book review by Joni:

Continuing to read novels by David Guterson, I recently finished his East of the Mountains. According to the jacket, this book was written five years after my favorite Guterson novel, Snow Falling on Cedars, but I didn’t find this story as well crafted and I struggled a little bit to see it all the way to the end.

East of the Mountains is about a 73 year old retired physician and widower named Ben Givens who, after discovering he is dying of cancer, decides to stage his suicide to look like a hunting accident. He plans to travel east towards the Cascade Mountains where he grew up to finish his plan but, early in his trip, he has a bizarre accident that sets him off course. At this point, the story took on a kind of surreal, odyssean quality. It began to meander from one strange event to the next. He meets several people who remind him of his childhood and of his courtship of his beloved wife and the narrative begins to interweave his present with his past. He has a bizarre encounter in the desert at night – a story twist that seems strikingly out of place – and this encounter eventually leads him toward the (somewhat predictable) conclusion of the story. Of course, throughout it all, he is wrestling with the fact that he is dying and that he has no control over that fact.

East of the Mountains is not a bad novel but I don’t really recommend it. In retrospect, it was the protagonist’s struggles with end-of-life issues that kept me reading. As you all know, I took care of my father, whom I adored, for nearly a year as he lost his life to multiple brain tumors. I honestly cannot imagine a more horrific way to die – and yet, even through the dementia, my father had tremendous dignity. His pain has caused me to be (hopefully prematurely) aware of the very personal process of dying that we sometimes have to go through in a very public way. I was interested in Ben’s struggles between ending life on his own terms and, conversely, unselfishly, giving his loved ones what they needed. I guess, in the end, every story speaks to us on a personal level.