Our lady of the forest
Guterson, David
Our Lady of the Forest Dal, id Guterson Gregory Wolfe n 1994, first-time novelist David Guterson suddenly found himself on the best-seller list with Snow Falling on Cedars, a richly atmospheric...
...It concerns a teenage runaway from Oregon named Ann Holmes, raised by a single mother who ekes out a living by picking mushrooms, both psychedelic and not...
...One unforgettable character is the aptly named Tom Cross...
...His most recent book is Intruding Upon the Time-less: Meditations on Art, Faith, and Mystery (Square Halo...
...Ann is a sexless waif and her Virgin is as ethereal and inhuman as it is possible to imagine...
...The Japanese-American characters at the heart of Cedars, for example, were noble and stoic while the Anglos were either bigots or, at best, venal weaklings...
...Guterson has said that he is concerned with the way the church always tries to repress grassroots movements, yet most of the people who gather around the visionary are either sad sacks or wackos...
...Along the way she be-comes a self-taught Catholic of sorts, whose faith is instructed by wide and indiscriminate reading, from Augustine's Confessions to Stephen King's The Dead Zone, from the 1986 Catholic Almanac to Letters from Medjugorje...
...One day, as she roams deep in the forest, ill with allergies and the flu, her sweat-shirt hood pulled tightly around her like a postmodern wimple, Ann experiences an apparition of the Virgin Mary...
...Tom's rage, misogyny, and racism are chillingly deSHE'S BACK I ALFRED A. KNOPF Commonweal 2 7 February 13, 2004 picted, but Guterson never lets the reader lose touch with his wounded humanity...
...The audience for literary fiction isn't immune to the incessant pressures of popular entertainment, forcing writers to turn increasingly to spectacle to attract readers...
...What brings them together is an urgent need for signs and wonders, not a political cause...
...His first two novels suffered from a high-toned moralism that was equal parts political correctness and vaguely Zen-flavored mysticism...
...Of course, it's hard not to contrast Guterson's treatment of this theme with Marlette in Ecstasy, by Ron Hansen, which covers similar ground...
...She ends up in a campground in the woods of North Fork, Washington, and supports herself with the one skill she knows best: mushroom picking deep in the rain forest...
...Now, with Our Lady of the Forest, the word is that Guterson is back on form, that this is his best book to date...
...The visionary herself remains opaque, as is perhaps inevitable...
...Perhaps with the modest response to his second novel, Guterson felt the need to return to a large, dramatic plot de-vice to hold his readers' attention...
...Most disturbing of all, one of the key themes in the novel—the destructive force of male lust and aggression—is never adequately addressed...
...Butler, representing the traditionalists entrenched in the institutional church, dismisses this as pantheism...
...The new novel is looser in both form and tone, more willing to take risks...
...Yet Ann's nature mysticism sounds suspiciously close to the voice of the narrator...
...Repeatedly raped from the age of fourteen by her mother's boyfriend, Ann buys a battered old car on her sixteenth birthday and drives away...
...PerMay 1999 Completes thesis on directing the church's mission to abused children...
...ties (if Loyola WESTON JESUIT SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY AN INTERNATIONAL THEOLOGICAL CENTER For information please contact: Office of Admissions • Weston Jesuit School of Theology 3 Phillips Place • Cambridge, MA 02138-3495 USA .Telephone (617) 442-1960 Fax (617) 492-5833 • Admissionslnfo@wjst.edu • www.wjst.edu FINANCIAL Ail) is AVAILABLE Commonweal 28 February 13, 2004...
...The book had it all: passion and prejudice, courtroom drama and battlefield action, a carefully conjured sense of the past and the timeliness of contemporary issues such as diversity, tolerance, and civil rights...
...t996 Enrolls at Weston Jesuit School of Theology...
...Despite all the trappings of religious drama—this book, like Cedars, is framed by a sort of trial, as the church strives to discern whether the apparition is valid or not—and the bizarre cast of characters who descend upon Ann, it becomes clear that Guterson is primarily interested in the community in which the story is set...
...She manipulates the crowds while scheming to slip off to Baja California with money donated for the Virgin's forest chapel...
...1988 Missionary far child workers and their families, Tacna, Peru...
...Here is a man who has lost nearly everything: his logging business, his marriage, even his son, who lies in a hospital bed paralyzed by a logging accident...
...1993 Youth Leadership Instructor: Voyageurs Outward hound School, Ely Minnesota Love ought to show itself in deeds more than in words...
...Gregory Wolfe is the editor of Image...
...The eponymous stigmatic of Hansen's book may ultimately be opaque, too, but she is rendered in three dimensions, with sexual, psychic, and spiritual longings ambiguous but palpable...
...rather than being a fully formed character in her own right, she occasion-ally sounds like the author's mouthpiece...
...Tom's sins are myriad, but he's also deeply attracted to the church, which he circles like a hungry wolf...
...To be sure, Ann conveys the Virgin Mary's distress at human "greed and selfishness," but this hardly makes the girl an avatar of class warfare...
...haps her spiritual eclecticism can be ascribed to her youth and lack of education...
...The problem is that the novel starts to creak under the weight of the apparition plot, which is also how Guterson's moralism sneaks back into the book...
...The local parish priest, Donald Collins, is arookie—a progressive who is nonetheless tortured by sexual frustration, including an attraction to Ann...
...Word spreads rapidly, abetted by the Internet, and in the ensuing days the crowds grow exponentially, bringing an array of fanatics, lost souls, and opportunists into the forest...
...And in this case the word happens to be right...
...Like other visionaries from Lourdes, Fatima, Medjugorje, Ann Holmes is young and poor...
...And yet if Guterson had decided to just give us North Fork in all its agony and yearning, we all might have been bet-ter served...
...He is soon joined by William Butler, a bilious conservative priest who jets around the country debunking Marian apparitions on behalf of the church...
...Graduates with Master of Divinity frurn Weston Jesuit School of Theology...
...Our Lady of the Forest Dal, id Guterson Gregory Wolfe n 1994, first-time novelist David Guterson suddenly found himself on the best-seller list with Snow Falling on Cedars, a richly atmospheric story set on an island in the Pacific Northwest...
...St...
...The crowds may believe they are flocking to a manifestation of maternal love, but there is no female character in the novel who remotely resonates with the earthy toughness of Mary, the mother of Jesus...
...WESTON JESUIT SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY Evan Cuthbert Master of Divinity • 1999 July1999 Director, Ignacio Volu Program, Boston Coll Campus Ministry Off 1998 Founding Member of the Weston Social Justice forum...
...Under questioning by Butler, Ann talks about her spirituality in terms of her response to the beauty of the sea and the stars...
...The message conveyed to Ann is a familiar amalgam of other Marian apparitions, including injunctions about renouncing sin, practicing various forms of piety lest the wrath of God be unleashed, the demand that a church be built on the spot of the revelations, and a promise that the Virgin will return over a series of days with further communications...
...Between the medicines she takes for her various illnesses and her occasional recreational drug use, there are ample reasons to reject her visions...
...An overweight, over-educated atheist named Carolyn be-comes Ann's protector...
...Ann, a "sparrow-boned" girl, suffers perpetually from asthma and allergies, popping antihistamines and magic mushrooms to get by...
...By contrast, Guterson 's sophomore effort, East of the Mountains, a quiet tale about aging and mortality, was greeted with polite indifference...
...Guterson excels not only in describing the beauty and dreariness of the rain forest, but also in taking us inside the hearts and minds of people living in this marginal place...
...She thus servesas a touchstone, revealing the deeper motives and anxieties of the characters around her...
Vol. 131 • February 2004 • No. 3
