The Slackers' Hawthorne

By Pico Iyer

"In the woods," wrote Emerson, "we return to reason and faith." In the woods around North Fork, Wash., however, the waiflike runaway and mushroom picker who stands, often silently, at the center of David Guterson's new novel finds a vision of the Virgin Mary. She also finds Satan, smart alecks and all the screaming spirits of premillennial America crying out to her for salvation. Within days of her first Marian sighting, 5,000 pilgrims are following the ecstasies of what they call Ann of Oregon, Greater Catholic Merchandise Outlet trucks are circling around and timber companies are sending out their p.r. representatives.

In most other recent novels about a young woman's epiphanies--Ron Hansen's stately Mariette in Ecstasy, Mark Salzman's piercing Lying Awake--the story turns upon the riddle of where revelation ends and delusion begins. Guterson's Our Lady of the Forest (Knopf; 323 pages) leaves such questions and the purity and mystery of Ann's sightings largely intact. Instead the author concentrates on how her clear, white vision refracts into a rainbow of reflections, few of them exalted. His book is, in effect, a group of portraits of beat-up, lived-in lives that amounts to a group portrait of America today.

North Fork, the unlikely site of the Virgin's visitations, is a gritty loggers' town where bumper stickers say KILL DOLPHINS and guys in the bar slur the N word while watching Monday Night Football. Its human landscape is one of stoned teenagers, bewildered immigrants, messed-up drunks and eco-fanatics. Anyone hoping for the delicate earnestness and lyrical settings of Guterson's earlier worksomething more like his best-selling Snow Falling on Cedars--is in for a rough surprise. If much of the story of the solitary "visionary," as he calls Ann, updates the classic witch trials of old and echoes the trajectory of every messiah, it could also be read as an account of what happens to those visionaries called celebrated novelists, surrounded by flunkies, groupies and flakes.

Our Lady of the Forest never goes quite as deeply into spiritual revelation or narrative resolution as readers might want. But it gives us an unflinching picture of Hawthorne's descendants in the wake of Kurt Cobain. More than that, it shows Guterson to be a serious and searching craftsman, very much in the American grain and determined to take himself further, into questions of possession (and of dispossession). Sometimes it feels as if all the neglected voices of the Pacific Northwest--self-righteous slackers, trailer-park priests, the sexually abused--are pouring through him in this book. What we choose to do with them, he suggests, has less to do with him than with ourselves. --By Pico Iyer