When David Guterson was a child, his mother Shirley warned him that people weren't who they appeared. 'She'd say things like, 'The mechanic at the gas station working on the car - it's not really him, he's wearing a mask,'' he says. Shirley herself had a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality: she could prepare dinner one night and be admitted to hospital the next.
Her paranoia about the identities that people assume contains some truth, however; in his new novel, The Other, Guterson considers how people are shaped by their repressed alternate selves. 'We're all inhabited by shadow figures,' he says, 'other permutations of ourself that are unconscious and yet impact on our lives.' The epigraph quotes French poet Arthur Rimbaud: 'I am an other.'
The Other tells of two friends, seemingly opposites, who bond as teenagers through their passion for the outdoors (see review below). The narrator, Neil Countryman, is a product of working-class stock who follows the relatively conventional path of Guterson's life - graduating from college, marrying young and becoming an English teacher.
Neil's friend, John William Barry, is a brooding heir to wealth, so outraged at society that he drops out of college and disappears into the wilderness. Neil, however, knows John's whereabouts and he devotedly brings his friend supplies and nurses their secret.
The Other is Guterson's most autobiographical novel, drawing on his experiences trekking through the mountains near Seattle as an adolescent in the early 1970s, which he recalls as a time of cultural limbo. 'We were the generation that was after the zeal of the 60s and slightly early for disco,' he says.
The Pacific northwest was also the setting of his debut novel Snow Falling on Cedars (1994), about the murder trial of a Japanese-American in 1954 when anti-Japanese sentiments were prevalent. Winning the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1995, Cedars sold nearly five million copies and was made into a film in 1999.
Guterson's subsequent novels, East of the Mountains (1999) and Our Lady of the Forest (2003), returned to his native landscape but earned less critical acclaim. East charts the spiritual journey of a retired surgeon diagnosed with terminal cancer; Our Lady is a dark fairy tale about a teenage runaway who claims to see the Virgin Mary.