David Guterson's first novel, Snow Falling on Cedars,  was a true ensemble piece, in which even a high-stakes murder trial seemed  like a judgment passed on the community at large. In his eloquent second  novel, however, the author swings dramatically in the opposite direction. East of the Mountains is the tale of a solitary, 73-year-old Seattle  widower. A retired heart surgeon, Ben Givens is an old hand at turning  isolation to his advantage, both professionally and personally: "When  everything human was erased from existence except that narrow antiseptic  window through which another's heart could be manipulated--few were as  adroit as Dr. Givens. "    Now, however, Ben has been dealt a problem entirely beyond his powers of  manipulation: a diagnosis of terminal cancer. With just a few months to  live, he sets out across the Cascades for a hunting trip, planning to take  his own life once he reaches the high desert. A car crash en route puts an  initial crimp in this suicide mission. But the ailing surgeon presses  onward--and begins a simultaneous journey into the past. Between  present-tense episodes, which demonstrate Ben's cranky commitment to his  own extinction, we learn about his boyhood in Washington's apple country,  his traumatic war experience in the Italian Alps, and the beginning of his  vocation. Guterson narrates the apple-scented idyll of Ben's childhood in a typically  low-key manner--and orchards, of course, are seldom the stuff of melodrama. Still, many of his ambling sentences offer miniature lessons in patience  and perception: "They rode back all day to the Columbia, traversed it on  the Colockum Ferry, and at dusk came into their orchard tired, on empty  stomachs, their hats tipped back, to walk the horses between the rows of  trees in a silent kind of processional, and Aidan ran his hands over limbs  as he passed them with his horse behind him, the limbs trembling in the  wake of his passing, and on, then, to the barn. " The wartime episodes,  however, are less satisfactory. Clearly Guterson has done his research down  to the last stray bullet, but there's a second-hand feeling to the  material, which seems less a token of Ben's detachment than the  author's. There is, alas, an additional problem. Begin a story with a planned  suicide, and there are exactly two possible outcomes. It would be unfair to  reveal Ben's fate. But as the forces of life and death yank him one way,  then another, Guterson tends to stack the deck--particularly during a bus  ride toward the end of the novel, when Ben's fellow passengers appear to  have wandered in from a Frank Capra film. Yet East of the Mountains  remains a beautifully imagined work, in which the landscape reflects both  Ben's desperation and his intermittent delight. And Guterson knows from the  start what his protagonist learns in painful increments: that "a neat,  uncomplicated end" doesn't exist on either side of the mountains. --James Marcus
It would be unfair to  reveal Ben's fate