EVELYN IN TRANSIT

An award-winning author continues to hone his craft.

In the opening scene of this novel, someone called Evelyn has an epiphany while climbing a tree. In the next scene, someone called Tsering has an epiphany while making eye contact with a yak. Both have the same thought in their moment of enlightenment: “I’m alive…I’m separate from everything else.” As the narrative progresses, it becomes clear that Evelyn is a girl growing up in Indiana and Tsering is a boy growing up in Tibet. It also becomes clear that enlightenment is not an unalloyed blessing—if it’s any kind of blessing at all. Both characters diverge from the paths they’re expected to follow, with complicated results. In another writer’s hands, the question that animates the final third of this novel—no spoilers—might be the whole show. This author has other things in mind. Guterson first gained widespread attention with Snow Falling on Cedars (1994), in which he turned courtroom drama into meditative prose. Our Lady of the Forest (2003) was, among other things, an insightful exploration of how we deal with spiritual guidance delivered by imperfect messengers. Like Snow Falling on Cedars, Guterson’s novel The Final Case (2022) includes a murder trial, and, like that previous work, it asks serious questions about what we believe and why we believe it. This new book feels familiar in that the author is still interested in the same moral and philosophical themes, but it also feels different in that Guterson has clearly set himself free from the encumbrance of plot and detail and most of the trappings of a typical novel. This is a compliment. Perhaps the best way to appreciate this book is to regard it as a set of interconnected fables. Like the heroes of fable, both Evelyn and Tsering only emerge as real when the reader adds the details that make them real.

For patient readers with open hearts.