David Guterson: Our Lady of the Forest

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

As he did in Snow Falling on Cedars, Guterson finds the kernel of his story among the mainstream's fringe. In that first, Faulkner Award-winning novel he explored racism through the experiences of Japanese living on an island in Puget Sound, Washington. Here his subject is humanity's great need for spiritual belief and salvation, and he has chosen as his unlikely cipher a skinny 16-year-old runaway, with repeated rape and two abortions in her past.

Now an itinerant mushroom-picker in the melancholic, sodden woods of North Fork, Washington, Ann Holmes lives in a tent in a campground inhabited by other social misfits. She struggles with her allergies and a nasty case of the flu, for which she pops numerous antihistamines and painkillers, and also has a history of using psychedelic mushrooms.

While she's out picking chanterelles, the Virgin Mary appears to her, "a spectral, wavering face and a pair of incandescent hands" within a ball of light. Ann tells another camp-dweller, an over-educated hippie named Carolyn, of her experience, and together they venture back into the woods. The apparition appears again to Ann, decries greed and selfishness, and tells her to build a church there in the woods. The Virgin tells Ann she will appear four more times.

In a cyber-flash, news of Ann's experience brings thousands of the hopeful to the down-and-out logging town, filling the motels and creating a boom. Ann, untouched by the commotion, single-mindedly pursues her quest (unlike Carolyn, who passes collection buckets around the crowd and siphons off the big notes for herself). At the behest of the Virgin, Ann draws in a local priest, Father Collins, who lives in a trailer and rejects the dog collar.

An unemployed logger "filled with hate" who perhaps deliberately caused an accident which left his son a paraplegic, completes the cast of major characters. Tom Cross stalks the pages, his anger and desperation growing, and from the beginning we suspect he is ripe for salvation.

Guterson writes beautifully, with quiet power, his pages peopled with wittily evoked characters who together comprise a Breughel-like illustration of life in all its shabby torment. Unemployment, hopelessness, illness, pain, divorce, lovelessness, empty sex, the hatred of people unlike ourselves, perpetual rain ... boy, do these people ever need hope and salvation.

As an exploration of spiritual need, this is inclusive, moving and even funny, although the theological and moral discussions (Descartes, Freud, Kierkegaard, anyone?) tend to ponderousness, the characters to overt symbolism and the ending to self-consciousness.

Nevertheless, there is much to enjoy along the way. Holy water in a plastic Wal-Mart bottle? "That's America," a character says - but of course, we knew that already.

Bloomsbury, $35