In his celebrated poem "The Road Not Taken," Robert Frost reflected on choice and destiny: "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--/ I took the one less traveled by,/ And that has made all the difference."
These powerful words inform award-winning writer David Guterson's most recent novel, The Other, an exploration of loyalty, compromise, and life decisions set in the Seattle of the last four decades and the Olympic Peninsula's lush west side.
In the novel, working-class Neil Countryman and wealthy John William Barry become unlikely friends in high school, drawn together by a mutual love of nature. Their adult lives diverge as wealthy John William embraces Gnosticism and retreats to a hermit's life near the Hoh River, while Neil follows a more conventional path as a teacher, husband, and father. Yet their bond of friendship holds, and Neil faces critical choices as he becomes an accomplice in his friend's secret existence.
The Other (Knopf) has been widely acclaimed. Kristine Huntley wrote in Booklist that "Guterson's novel of friendship and ideas is a moving meditation on choices, sacrifices, and compromises made in search of an authentic life." And, from critic John Marshall of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: "This fine, searching novel represents the mature talent of one of the Northwest's leading writers."
Guterson is best known for his novel Snow Falling on Cedars (1994), winner of the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award and adapted for the 1999 movie starring Ethan Hawke. Guterson also wrote East of the Mountains (1999) and Our Lady of the Forest (2003), as well as a short story collection, The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind (1989). He was born in Seattle and now lives with his family on nearby Bainbridge Island.
Guterson talked about The Other and his writing life at the historic Panama Hotel in Seattle's International District.
What inspired your novel The Other?
There's not any single thing. I go for periods between books where I don't know what I'm going to write next. Writing about a hermit intrigued me.
Were you influenced by Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild about a man who fled into the Alaskan woods?
I wouldn't say influenced by it, but very aware of it. That book isn't about a hermit, but a romantic in the strict sense of the word -- someone much in the American tradition of the vagabond [like] Kerouac, Huck Finn.
A theme of The Other may be "compromise or die," at least in terms of the character who shares some aspects of your life.
I feel, for better or worse, here we are sitting in a tea shop at the Panama Hotel in Seattle, and we could relentlessly analyze the irresponsibility of so doing. The way we have increased our carbon footprint just by getting here. The way in which we have exploited the labor other people on the planet just to sit here at this table, in this chair, with this tea, and this tape recorder, and these books, and none of this could be here without other people living much more humbly than we do. You can be paralyzed by these ethical and political considerations. So do you become paralyzed, or do you acknowledge your own hypocrisy [and] compromises and keep going? Those are essential questions in this novel.
The character Neil Countryman, like you, attended Roosevelt High School in Seattle, worked as a teacher, and encountered sudden notoriety, as you did with Snow Falling on Cedars.
Let's go back to Roosevelt High School in the early '70s, when the Seattle School District decided that bussing was going to help address the problem of race in the city, so Roosevelt was an interesting place to be. You had a significant percentage of kids [who] grew up with affluence in Windermere and Laurelhurst, and you had blue-collar kids from Ravenna or towards Green Lake, and then you had kids bussed in from other parts of the city. These people with different backgrounds and worldviews were thrust together.
If you were a thinking, sensitive person, you were acutely aware of the clash of cultures and the socioeconomic caste system in this school that manifested itself in cliquishness among young people. I grew up in Bryant and I always felt myself as poised between worlds, and I think that position was useful to me as the writer of this book.
In The Other, John William Barry from the affluent Laurelhurst world bonds with Neil Countryman, who is from a family of carpenters.
Poised between worlds, I could see them both growing up. I moved in both worlds, but I was not of either world.
And John William, the privileged person, becomes a hermit.
People who grow up with privilege and affluence are in a better position to do this because they ultimately have something to fall back on. A blue-collar kid like Neil is never going to throw it all over and become a hermit, because people in that position for the most part feel they better get a job because they have to take care of themselves and have nothing to fall back on. Very often, people of privilege have the freedom to indulge eccentric lifestyles.
Ultimately, John William is the dominant figure. He makes the decisions. He leads. John William is so inflated and so full of hubris that he can't hear anybody else's voice. He hears only his own voice. He's going to do what he's going to do.
But John William doesn't pull Neil into isolation with him.
What happens to Neil is what happens to most people. You meet somebody and there's deep human longing for love and connection that becomes the center of your life. Once that happens, living strictly in the world of ideas no longer makes sense. You now have no choice but to live in the world. It's a primal impulse.
John William also calls Neil a sellout to the master class.
Right. Work for "Hamburger World." Ultimately, John William would prefer that Neil [make] no compromise, but Neil is truly a friend. He needs somebody. No man is an island.
And they share stories and ideas and poetry, and Neil brings food and Penthouse and Playboy magazines out to the hermit John William.
And dope and mushrooms and acid. Life is more than just a can of Spam.
Is this the first time you've used autobiographical elements in a novel?
I arrived at an age -- in my 50s -- where I could look back with some objectivity, some dispassion, at my life as a younger adult. Earlier I felt the danger of emotional indulgence inherent in autobiographical novels when it's often more engaging and dramatic for [the writer] than it could possibly be to anyone else.
In your novels, nature is virtually a character, and here you again powerfully evoke the Olympic Peninsula and the Seattle area.
Writing in the first person, I handled nature differently. It's filtered through Neil's sensibility of a teacher, of somebody who loves poetry, who sees nature in literary terms. It's more the realm of the romantic poets, where you go when civilization exhausts you. That sense of the balm. The sense of nature of providing solace.
The Pacific Northwest famously attracts misfits and outcasts, and your novel explores this edginess.
The standard demographic theory about the Pacific Northwest is that, by virtue of history and geography, it has drawn eccentrics and people who prefer the edge, who have been ceaselessly dissatisfied and prompted always to move on in search of something satisfying. For example, utopian socialists came out here early on to try experimental ways of living. You had people from all kinds of peripheral intellectual, social and cultural visions bringing themselves to bear on this part of the world.
And you also have a higher suicide rate here than other parts of the country. People speculate about the darkness and the rain. They keep going until they get to California, and California doesn't work, and there's nowhere to go but up in the corner, and jump off the Aurora Bridge.
And your book deals with the mental illness of John William and his mother.
That's right. There is some in the case of John William. Neil, who's very close to it, sees an element of derangement, [but] also sees a self-contained, intellectual logic in John William's worldview.
There is no doubt about the madness of John William's mother.
Ginnie is truly mentally ill in the clinical sense. If you had to give a clinical name, you'd say she has paranoid schizophrenia. Certainly you see her paranoia as she becomes resistant to the chemical facts of life. Everything is dangerous. The world is not safe. It's environmental paranoia.
But fundamentally she's suffering from the kind of fermenting frustration that comes from feeling unfulfilled by life, living the wrong life. She's not being who or what she's meant to be. I think it's emblematic of something that burgeoned into a much larger social concern in the '60s and '70s as women recognized how these forces were at work in their lives. For her, the child became this bellwether problem, and she brings to bear all the force of [her] problems on the child. If only I didn't have the child, I could be myself. A lot of the neurosis or even psychosis is brought to bear on the child, who suffers from it as well, and this happens to John William.
And you become a poet in the voice of Ginnie in the book.
I did write Ginnie's poems, but not with the idea that Ginnie was a spectacular poet. She's a mediocre poet at best, but there is a psychological intensity and nakedness that can make a reader continue to read in the psychological drama.
I'd never written any poetry until I wrote those poems.
Are you writing other poems?
I just published or am about to publish 15 poems.
You didn't write poetry as a student?
From elementary school through high school, I never wrote anything except what the teachers told me to write. I had no interest in writing.
What inspired you to write?
In the early '70s, it never occurred to me to care about anything. I just lived. I didn't think much beyond what I was going to do that night.
Then you went to the University of Washington and majored in English.
At college, I [had] a chance to start over, to reinvent myself. I said I'm going to really try now. I got my BA in English, then I got my Masters in Creative Writing, and then I got a teaching certificate.
In my 20s, I wrote short stories. I didn't have a novel going until my late 20s. Two or three bad ones were half done, but horrible. Then I started teaching, and slowly worked on Snow Falling on Cedars.
Who are some of your influences as a writer?
It's hard to say who were influences. I know who I've admired and felt a sense of awe. Obvious ones would be Joyce and Tolstoy and Melville. If genius means something, it means what these people have. True greats. They are influences in the sense that you want to achieve the same end. The same beauty. The same truth.
Your enthusiasm for writing is obvious.
It's fun. There's a real exhilaration from feeling invited by the muse and the material. Feeling that sense of being a conduit, hearing the words in your head, and working with the words. I enjoy it. I wouldn't do it if I didn't enjoy it.
What would you advise younger writers who are just starting out?
It's really simple. Push other stuff away. Get a garret, something that is 50 bucks a month. Keep your life simple so that when you get up in the morning, writing is the main thing. If it's not the main thing, it isn't going to happen. The writer gets up and says I'm a writer. That's the only advice I have. Keep it simple.