Ben Givens is a retired heart surgeon, who recently learned that he’s dying of colon cancer. He has told no one. One October day, he and his beloved bird dogs head out on a hunt, during which he plans to stage an accident and shoot himself. Even if you believe the good doctor will really pull the trigger–do you?–“East” is a slow, solitary book, its plot a distressingly slack wire. Early on, Ben totals his car. He spends the remainder of the novel looking like hell, hitchhiking and depending on the kindness of strangers. All the while, he sorts through a lifetime’s worth of maudlin memories. Ben remembers his mother who, on her deathbed, exhorted him to “do something grand and wonderful. Whatever your heart desires.” And he daydreams about his late wife, a nurse he married during World War II. Unfortunately, the couple’s war-torn love story is so utterly familiar that it feels like stock footage: “She had seen men legless, armless, and blind, their faces seared beyond recognition, their backs riddled with shrapnel.”
In general, there’s painfully little to pull you through this book. Guterson’s prose is precise but bland, his assurances about the meaning of life ultimately a turnoff. (" ‘There’s no wrong way,’ the drifter said. ‘Whatever gets you there’.") Guterson is clearly interested in the unlikely communion of people, and the phrase “East of the Mountains” appears to be his metaphor for Ben’s search for peace beyond anger. But this story and these characters just don’t resonate the way he intends them to. Ben slogged on through the woods long after I got sick of walking.
