Scraping the Fringe

I just finished reading my second summer novel. It is called Our Lady of the Forest by David Guterson. I actually picked up the book about a year ago in Singapore, a couple of months before I left. There was a book sale in one of the malls and I saw that it was from the same author who wrote Snow Falling on Cedars.

My familiarity with the authors work is rooted only in my watching of the movie version of Snow. I was very young at the time but I remember it being abstract and strange with its use of images. With those reasons in mind, I decided to purchase Forest.

Without recapping the whole, basically the story is about a mushroom picking girl in a small town in Washington state suddenly being able to see the Virgin Mary. Suddenly, this revelation changes the life of not only the girl but also the lives of the townspeople as well. Through the story’s different characters we different points of view about religion, people’s struggle to place religion within their lives, and the potential for commercialism that comes with “Marian Apparitions”.

One of the beautiful things about the story is that each character embodies these contradictions as they reconcile what they want, what they believe, and what they think should be. They are not two-dimensional or black and white in their views. Everybody has their faults and their secrets that makes them human. It reminds me the play Closer. I’ve talked to a couple of people that find characters like those unlikeable but to me that’s what makes them real. People are full of contradictions and faults, whether we like them or not.

The plot itself moves slowly at first, introducing and endearing certain characters to the reader. By the last third of the novel, the pace moves briskly preventing you from abandoning the book.

There were a couple of things I dreaded when reading it. Guterson uses a structure that barely used any quotation marks to indicate conversations. He relied heavily on block paragraphs that would dominate pages at a time. I have no clue if that was done intentionally but it had the tendency to tire me out. The other criticism I have is that people’s backstories were given as they were introduced, not weaved in and out of the main plot line. I would lose sight of the main story and make me wonder “what does this have to do with everything?” It’s a style of storytelling that many writers have tried to avoid. Exposition should be done sparingly or be used by a character who has legitimate reason or knowledge to do it. In the book, it feels forced or that he has to keep his page count down. As the different threads start to come together, you do appreciate the characters backstories.

All in all the novel was decent but was uneven in the way it was executed. If you have a fascination with Roman Catholicism, its history or mythos then the novel will interest you. However, if you are looking for an excellent and easy read I suggest you go somewhere else.