‘Our Lady’ captivates the pen of an agnostic

David Guterson can’t keep his eyes off the fruit bowl. “Are those figs?” he asks, poking into the crystal dish in his room at the Four Seasons. He’s not hungry, just curious. “I’m actually fascinated with everyone and everything,” he says. “I really am.”

He’s even worse in a bookstore, pulling stuff off shelves at random, willing to read anything that catches his fancy. Several years ago, for example, he chanced upon a tome about a French peasant girl who claimed in the 19th century that the Virgin Mary was appearing to her at Lourdes.

Guterson, whose first novel was the blockbuster “Snow Falling on Cedars,” then started reading about other Marian apparitions, including several reported in the U.S. in recent decades. He discerned a pattern: In troubled times, a poor, young girl beholds a vision, doubts it, but is eventually compelled to speak about what she sees, inspiring pilgrimages by the faithful and eventually forcing the church to come to grips with the event.

“American apparitions had this carnival atmosphere and this tawdry capitalism attached to them,” Guterson says. “I got interested in that particular American nexus between the divine and the tawdry.”

The result is “Our Lady of the Forest,” Guterson’s new novel, the story of an elfin runaway in a dying timber town in the Pacific Northwest who goes mushroom picking and winds up coming back from the woods with instructions from the Virgin Mary to build her a shrine in the forest.

“Ann,” Guterson writes of his unlikely heroine, “was diminutive, sparrow-boned, and when she covered her head with her sweatshirt hood it was easy to mistake her for a boy of 12, fair-skinned and dreamy. She often wheezed asthmatically, sneezed feebly, blew her nose and coughed against her fist or palm. On most mornings her jeans were wet with the rain or dew transferred from the fronds of ferns and her hands looked pink and raw.... Those who saw her in the woods that fall ... were struck by her inconsequence and by the wariness of her eyes in shadow underneath the drawn hood.”

Reviewers have been struck by the book’s rich array of characters -- doubters, believers and crass exploiters -- who troop to the woods with Ann and turn her vision into a media event.

A review in The Times said, “His gripping, darkly comic new novel marks an expansion of his vision, a deepening exploration of the richly layered realm of the Pacific Northwest that Guterson has come to own as surely as William Faulkner did his Yoknapatawpha County.”

“Panoramic, psychologically dense,” added Publishers Weekly. “Searching for the miraculous in the mundane, this ambitious and satisfying work builds vivid characters and trenchant storytelling into a serious and compassionate look at the moral quandaries of modern life.”

Raised in a secular Jewish household, Guterson professes no faith but seems fascinated by the attempts of others to integrate spirituality into their lives.

“These stories tied into something deeper that I had been thinking about,” he says. “As a sort of conventional American secular humanist, a modern-day agnostic, I was dissatisfied with God the Father.”

Guterson then launches into a long explication of agnosticism, which boils down to the idea that people really want to believe in a holy mother.

“The cult of the Virgin Mary,” he says, “is this instinctive upwelling, this surge of need on the part of ordinary human beings to have something feminine in the divine that’s not provided for in these patriarchal religions.”

The novelist did a lot of research into Catholicism but didn’t find anything to believe in.

“I wouldn’t say I arrived at any answers, but the questions got deeper and richer for me.”

Guterson would not seem like the type to be troubled with existential angst. At 47, he looks a decade younger, his hair dark and thick.

His father was a well-known defense attorney in Seattle, where Guterson was born. He’s been married to the same woman for more than half his life. He lives on woodsy Bainbridge Island, outside of Seattle. Three of his children are enrolled at the University of Washington. The fourth goes to a Waldorf school.

“Existential questions don’t keep me up at night,” Guterson says. “I’m not tortured. Dostoyevsky was tortured. But I spend a considerable amount of time very aware of existential questions. I don’t easily escape them.”

During his junior year at the University of Washington, Guterson signed up for a creative writing class and became hooked on making up stories.

“I was totally fixated and absorbed,” he says. “I felt such a love that I lived and breathed it; I was desperate to write every day; I needed it just to feel good about life.”

He earned a master’s in creative writing and tried various jobs -- selling firewood, working for the Forest Service -- and eventually became a high school English teacher on Bainbridge Island. Always, he wrote.

He published a story collection called “The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind” in 1989, followed by a book about home schooling (“Family Matters”). Then came “Snow Falling on Cedars,” a love story-courtroom drama about a Japanese American charged with murder. The 1994 book was awash in lyricism and the lush Northwest landscape, and it won a PEN/Faulkner Award. It sold almost 4 million copies, and the movie rights went for a million dollars.

That pretty much ended Guterson’s dozen-year career as a high school teacher. “I do like teaching,” he says, “but the circumstances of teaching in public education are overwhelming and stressful, and I can’t say that I miss that.”

“East of the Mountains,” his 1998 novel about an elderly widower with cancer who sets off on a hunting trip across the Cascade Mountains with the intention of killing himself, was another bestseller, although not nearly so universally praised.

“There’s been a kind of narrative that’s developed about my second novel,” Guterson says. “A lot of feature writers have decided that the story is that ‘Snow Falling on Cedars’ was a huge success and ‘East of the Mountains’ was some kind of plummet and now perhaps in some way I’ve risen again. But actually [for] ‘East of the Mountains,’ 95% of the reviews were excellent. The book was a bestseller in both hardcover and paperback. I’ve never thought of that novel as some kind of failure, either with fans or critics. Sometimes people need a story line.”

Recently, Guterson has gotten back into teaching, on his own terms. He has endowed a fellowship in creative writing at the University of Washington, which gives the winning grad student cash and a weeklong personal tutorial with the novelist. He has also co-founded Field’s End, a writing workshop. “It’s an opportunity for me to teach and to create more opportunities for other writers.”

And almost every week he still heads into the wilderness of the Olympic Mountains, an hour’s drive from his home, for a day of hiking.

“The rain forest presents the traveler with a kind of paradox,” Guterson explains. “It’s this incredibly lush and alive ecosystem at the same time that life is all predicated on the presence of death, constant death. Everything is all living and dying at the same time. It’s inspirational.”

It’s a landscape that Guterson says he expects to continue to mine for his novels.

“I wouldn’t feel capable of setting a novel anyplace else,” he says. “I feel I have a good understanding of its history, culture and economy. I write about the area with a deep feeling and affection. It’s something that I sometimes need to restrain, which I think I have in this book far more than the last two. Landscape plays a major role in this book, but in a much more muted way.”

Guterson is usually at his desk writing by 7 in the morning, six days a week, seven if things are going really well.

“I still have an enormous passion for writing. It’s the act itself, the actual moment of writing and the pleasure that comes from a sentence that you really feel good about. The rest of it is a mixed bag -- the reviews, the book tour, the readings. The writing itself remains extremely satisfying. It’s very difficult, but its satisfactions seem to be something I can depend on in my life.”