Neil's friend, John William Barry, is a brooding heir to wealth, so outraged at society that he drops out of college and disappears into the wilderness. Neil, however, knows John's whereabouts and he devotedly brings his friend supplies and nurses their secret.

The Other is Guterson's most autobiographical novel, drawing on his experiences trekking through the mountains near Seattle as an adolescent in the early 1970s, which he recalls as a time of cultural limbo. 'We were the generation that was after the zeal of the 60s and slightly early for disco,' he says.

The Pacific northwest was also the setting of his debut novel Snow Falling on Cedars (1994), about the murder trial of a Japanese-American in 1954 when anti-Japanese sentiments were prevalent. Winning the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1995, Cedars sold nearly five million copies and was made into a film in 1999.

Guterson's subsequent novels, East of the Mountains (1999) and Our Lady of the Forest (2003), returned to his native landscape but earned less critical acclaim. East charts the spiritual journey of a retired surgeon diagnosed with terminal cancer; Our Lady is a dark fairy tale about a teenage runaway who claims to see the Virgin Mary.

In The Other, Guterson, 52, asks whether it is possible - or desirable - to lead a life of uncompromising principle. 'Neil projects his own alienation onto somebody else so that he doesn't have to carry it in his conscious life,' he says. 'John is projecting his own will towards conventionality onto Neil.'

The novel is narrated in flashback as Neil considers how his friend developed a hatred of civilisation and what he termed 'the hamburger world'. 'I started with the question floating around after 9/11: why do they hate us?' Guterson says. 'This book is a look at somebody who has a devastating critique of western society.'

Neil wonders about the role of John's parents in fostering his rage, particularly that of his mentally ill mother, Virginia, whose idea of disciplining her infant son was to ignore his cries. Guterson admits that Virginia's condition is similar to Shirley's undiagnosed illness, which lasted for 10 years and disappeared when her children grew up. He suggests his mother's condition was probably a reaction to the pressures of child-rearing.

Guterson's father, Murray, remains at 78 a noted criminal-defence lawyer, but he was largely absent in Guterson's childhood. Murray was the model for Nels Gudmundsson, the defence lawyer of Cedars, and Guterson says his father and Nels share the 'distance from which they view events and the sadness with which they view human nature'. John's workaholic father, Rand, wonders guiltily whether he contributed to his son's fate by being passive about his wife's neglect.

As a child, Guterson accepted that his father needed to work long hours; such were the norms of the day. But it felt odd that his mother, a perennial student who never worked, was rarely home. 'You were more likely as a kid then to be mad at your mum, and say, 'Hey all the other mums are making breakfast. What are you doing?' 'Well, I'm off,'' he parrots Shirley. ''You make your own breakfast.''

Fortunately, Guterson wasn't an only child like John and he and his four siblings took care of each other: 'We worked together to get breakfast.' Guterson remembers visiting his mother on a mental ward when she was heavily medicated. 'They make them do things like draw little pictures or make little clay figurines or play shuffleboard and it's like your mum's in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. You'd come out of the hospital and you'd think, God, I wish I'd never visited. I don't want to see this,' he says.

Guterson seems to have attained the stability he lacked as a child by sticking to the conventional and the known. He has spent almost all his life within several kilometres of his Seattle birthplace, only once moving interstate for a master's degree in creative writing at Brown University, Rhode Island.

He quit after two months, finding the programme overly experimental and himself frustrated by the seminar environment. 'It was one of those writing programmes where you sit at a seminar table with 10 other people and you go over people's manuscripts and they all yell and get mad at each other.'

Guterson lives on a 10.9-hectare property on an island in Puget Sound, off Seattle, and says what he likes most about the nearby mountain terrain is its familiarity. 'It's just great to know some place well and know what you're looking at in all directions.' He cannot imagine returning to the city because 'you spend all your time on logistics; everything is just too much trouble'.

His four children - now 15, 23, 24 and 27 years old - could never say they were abandoned: Guterson's wife, Robin, his high-school flame, taught them at home until their teenage years. Last year, the couple adopted a seven-year-old girl, Yerusalem, from Ethiopia.

Guterson made the case for home teaching in Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense (1992) and doesn't think parents' emotional involvement with their children precludes them from being effective teachers. 'That's far less of a problem,' he says, 'than what we see in public schools, where there's no emotional relationship for the most part between most students and most teachers.'

Nor does he believe that it is important for children to socialise every day with their peers. 'In many institutionalised educational settings there's a kind of neurotic social engagement that's competitive and clique-ish. It's not really normal to take a whole lot of people of their own age and just force them to be together all day.'

His friend, novelist Charles Johnson, remembers Guterson talking fondly about the values he acquired during his years as a Boy Scout, when he rose to the rank of Eagle. 'He's always been solid as a rock,' says Johnson, who taught Guterson at the University of Washington, where he earned a graduate degree in creative writing after leaving Brown. 'He has none of the childish and irresponsible traits that we in the west often associate with creative people - drunkenness, sexual promiscuity or drug use.'

Guterson acknowledges that he remains a Scout in spirit. 'If there's an old lady who needs help to cross the street, I'm not embarrassed to help her. I don't think it's corny.' But he still has peccadillos. For years, he shot birds and ate them. 'I did it without giving it a lot of thought,' he says, 'but at a certain point I started thinking, I just don't want to knock another bird down.'

His good deeds are many. As an undergraduate at the University of Washington, Guterson volunteered as a firefighter during his summer holidays; the smoke gave his voice its permanent rasping quality. With the windfall from Cedars he co-founded a writers' centre, Field's End, and endowed a scholarship for creative-writing students at his alma mater.

Guterson wrote Cedars in a period of eight years while working as a teacher and struggling to raise his children in a dilapidated shack on an annual income of less than US$30,000. After the book became a best-seller he built a more comfortable home and became a full-time writer. But he continued to live modestly - no holiday houses, lavish cars, boats or expensive travel - and mentions the teachings of Buddha as an important influence.

Raised Jewish and now an agnostic, he finds himself increasingly preoccupied with spiritual questions. 'Just by virtue of getting older I think everybody becomes more spiritual. Coming to grips with the absolute undeniable reality of your death forces you to start asking yourself, what am I going to do right now that matters? Is there anything that matters?' He adds: 'The general trend over time in my life with regard to these questions is towards a much greater calmness about them.'

He also appears calm about his childhood, despite what The Other suggests, and refuses to pass judgment on his mother. 'Nowadays I think people would say it shouldn't be just her responsibility to make breakfast. She had every bit as much right to go out and [study] as my dad had to do what he did.'

The forgiving words of a polite and loyal Eagle Scout that perhaps mask an angry child underneath.

Writer's notes

Name: David Guterson

Genres: literary fiction; non-fiction

Latest book: The Other Current project: another novel

Age: 52

Family: married to Robin Ann Radwick, speech therapist; five children

Home: Puget Sound, Seattle

Other books: The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind: Stories (1989); Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense (1992); Snow Falling on Cedars (1994); East of the Mountains (1999); Our Lady of the Forest (2003)

Other jobs: English teacher; firefighter

What the papers say:

'[The Other] is a fine, searching novel [that] represents the mature talent of one of the northwest's leading writers' - Seattle Post-Intelligencer

'[The Other's] welter of names and details is supposed to take the place of credible character development, but the result is every bit as entertaining as reading a street guide or a mail-order catalogue' - The Los Angeles Times

Author's bookshelf

The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski

'This guy spent 40 years as a journalist in Africa. He got arrested, he got malaria - whatever is your worst nightmare about Africa this guy went and found. He tells it like it is and it isn't politically correct.'

My Traitor's Heart by Rian Malan

'Malan comes from a white Boer South African family that goes way back in the history of settlement. He has become a leftist radical critic of the very forces that his forefathers represented. It's a great book. You can see from the title how conflicted he feels.'

Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 by Seamus Heaney

'This is a selected poems over a 30-year period by a guy who would win the Nobel Prize. He's such an exquisite artist. The guy knows what he's doing with the English language.'

Strong is Your Hold by Galway Kinnell

'He's a less dense poet than Heaney. But [his poems are] every bit as sophisticated.'

The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology by Robert Bringhurst

'He looks at the poetry that has been produced by indigenous Haida poets. He shows you that these people have a poetic tradition nobody's aware of. It opens up a reality that would otherwise be lost forever.'