Rebirth and the Restless Heart

In a November 1997 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, Carolyn Massey faced fierce criticism for her “irresponsible” parenting. Hoping to explain her family’s circumstances after years of media attention, she was publicly shamed—amplified by a statement from her mother and sister condemning her decisions. “I didn’t speak to my sister for two years after what she said about me on Oprah,” she later told Seattle Met, “but I’ve gotten over it. Buddhism helps you get over that kind of stuff.”

Massey became a media sensation in 1995, when reporters learned that her 4-year-old son, Sonam, had been recognized as the reincarnation of Dezhung Rinpoche III, a Tibetan lama of the Sakya lineage who had settled in Seattle after fleeing Tibet. National coverage turned to controversy when Massey announced she would send her son to Nepal to be raised at Tharlam Monastery. Though his late father was Tibetan, Massey was white, midwestern, and raised Catholic. How, critics asked, could such a “normal” American mother entrust her child to men in robes a world away?

Evelyn In Transit: A Novel
by David Guterson
W.W. Norton & Company, 2026, 256 pp., $29.99, hardcover

Best known for Snow Falling on Cedars, author David Guterson turns to Buddhism in his new historical fiction novel, Evelyn in Transit, to craft an imaginative answer to this question. The book follows the offbeat paths of Evelyn Bednarz and Tsering Lekpa, loosely based on Massey and Dezhung. Told in alternating perspectives, Evelyn in Transit weaves the lives of two outsiders driven by existential curiosity and a resolve to, in Evelyn’s words, “live the right way.”

Guterson’s novel opens with a young Evelyn climbing a tree in Evansville, Indiana, while across the world, a young Tsering climbs a pile of yak hides near his home in Tibet. At the top, both experience the same revelation: “I’m alive. I’m separate from everything else.” When they jump down, their feet touch the earth—childhood ends.

For Evelyn, that moment sparks a lifelong urge to understand her purpose in the world. She develops eccentric interests, such as visits to the nearby sacred Mississippian site called Angel Mounds, roller derby, and books about living off the land. Tall and heavy for her age, she becomes an easy target for teasing and fills her days with odd jobs, like mowing lawns, delivering newspapers, and babysitting.

After her parents’ divorce, Evelyn follows her father to Bloomington and attends Matrix, a high school for students with behavioral challenges. She first learns about Buddhism while preparing a class presentation on the life and reincarnation of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. “Pretty much a mind-blower,” she declares to her classmates. Soon after, she leaves town on foot, resolved to live by her own designs: “Nothing would be better or worse than the next thing. Everything would be equal. . . . All she wanted was to live life the right way, if that wasn’t asking too much from life.”

In Tibet, a 6-year-old Tsering is sent to live with his uncle Samten, who teaches him to read and write, and to fear hungry ghosts. When Samten falls ill, monks visit and question the boy. His answers confirm that he is a tulku, the reincarnation of the Fifth Norbu Rinpoche, and he is sent to Thaklung Monastery near Lhasa. Like Evelyn, Tsering grows up struggling with his education and discipline. And, like Evelyn, he eventually leaves in search of freedom. “I’m tired of the monastery,” he tells his brother, Sonam, before disappearing into the mountains on a donkey.

Evelyn and Tsering’s coming-of-age stories parallel the Buddha’s own—each driven by restlessness and self-determination. In the book’s long middle section, which reads like a road novel, the two, now adults, wander through landscapes of suffering and impermanence, encountering the same four sights of the Buddha after leaving his palace: old age, sickness, death, and asceticism.

Across the American Northwest, a 20-something Evelyn hitchhikes from job to job—picking rocks, apples, and salal, and caring for the sick and elderly. She eventually arrives at Peace Mountain, a fictional Tibetan Buddhist retreat center likely modeled on Sakya Monastery in Seattle. There she meets Lama Lobsang, who tells her she lacks freedom. “Freedom from what?” she asks. “Freedom from Evelyn Bednarz,” he replies.

During her stay, Evelyn carries 1,000 stones up the mountain for the construction of a stupa, a feat that earns her a brief profile in the Sunday Herald. On her way out, she meets Scott, the man who will accompany her for years, impregnate her, and finally disappear without a word.

Evelyn’s strange and spellbinding journey to becoming the mother of a tulku is singular yet deeply human.

Meanwhile, in Tibet, Tsering’s 20s and 30s unfold against the turmoil of Chinese occupation. Traveling through the high mountains, he witnesses starvation, death, and despair. In one scene, vultures pick at the frozen bodies of Chinese soldiers; in another, a mother flees, forced to leave her daughter’s body behind. Eventually, he returns to the monastery, but when the People’s Liberation Army’s advance makes staying impossible, he leaves once more—this time for good.

A chance meeting with a group of Western religion scholars offers Tsering a new path. They invite him to Seattle to work as a Tibetan translator at the University of Washington—a relationship that Guterson portrays with understated irony. “As tragic as recent events were,” one scholar admits, “they were fortuitous for academics like [me].”

Guterson’s portrayal of Tibet before the occupation and its aftermath is nuanced and compassionate, and the same can be said of his portrayal of a Tibetan man. He writes from Tsering’s perspective with cautious restraint, taking care not to mysticize the life of a Tibetan lama or oversimplify it. He achieves this by keeping the prose focused on the world around Tsering without projecting on Tsering’s thoughts and emotions. And while much of Tsering’s inner world remains a mystery, Guterson ensures that the most important bits can be gleaned from his powerful and brief interactions with others.

Guterson’s skillful approach to writing about Tibet reflects his personal connection to Dezhung Rinpoche III’s family. As a boy in Seattle, Guterson met Ani Sakya, a member of the Sakya Khon lineage and Rinpoche’s great-nephew, in his neighborhood. What began as a contentious relationship with Sakya grew into a lifelong friendship, giving Guterson rare access to the local Tibetan community. He later studied Tibetan at the University of Washington, where Dezhung Rinpoche worked as a consultant.

Some of Dezhung’s remembered habits—long neighborhood walks, resting his bad knee in strangers’ front yards—reappear in Tsering’s life in Seattle. Though haunted by memories of Tibet, Tsering finds contentment in exile. When a monk urges him to join the rebuilding of Thaklung Monastery in Kathmandu, he declines: “I don’t want to live in a monastery again and be an abbot on a throne who owns silver cups and can’t go anywhere without people putting their foreheads on the floor.” Instead, he continues translating, teaching, walking, and connecting with people until his death from natural causes in the late 1980s.

Tsering and Evelyn’s paths finally converge in Evansville, Indiana. Evelyn, now living with her mother after Scott’s disappearance, is raising her 4-year-old son, Cliff. One day, monks arrive to tell her that Cliff is the Seventh Norbu Rinpoche. Before his death, Tsering had a dream of a landscape resembling Evelyn’s hometown and an episode of déjà vu when speaking to a broad midwestern woman. The monks discovered Evelyn through the Sunday Herald article about her stone-carrying feat; further research confirmed that Cliff was born ten months after Tsering’s death.

As the revelation sinks in, Evelyn wrestles with coincidence and fate, the meaning of reincarnation, and what it means to be a good parent. All the while, she faces judgment from the public and her own family. Guterson infuses the outrage with the same rhetoric aimed at Carolyn Massey.

Through the parallel lives of Evelyn and Tsering, Guterson reveals how suffering and aspiration can come together in every attempt to live “the right way.”

Evelyn’s decision about Cliff’s future culminates in a televised interview with the talk show host Susan Orloff, a clear callback to Massey’s appearance on Oprah. “My whole life,” Evelyn tells the audience, “I’ve felt like something’s wrong, something’s missing, something isn’t right about, you know, this.” The missing piece, she realizes, couldn’t be found in Catholicism, independence and travel, or fleeting fame. Everything, in the end, felt empty. But perhaps, by going to Nepal and leading a spiritual life, Cliff won’t have to feel that same emptiness. “I love my son,” she says. “I just keep thinking I don’t want him to grow up and be like, you know, something’s missing.”

Beyond directly addressing one of Evelyn in Transit’s essential questions, Evelyn’s speech on Susan Orloff’s show cements Guterson’s skill in crafting crystalline, contemplative prose. Taken as a whole, one of the most compelling aspects of this story is the way that Guterson tells it. No word feels amiss, excessive, or forced. Much of Evelyn’s internal and external dialogue is straightforward and simple yet filled with layers of meaning. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand exactly what she means. And more importantly, you don’t have to relate to her complicated life story to feel exactly how she feels.

And here lies the heart of Evelyn in Transit. Evelyn’s strange and spellbinding journey to becoming the mother of a tulku is singular yet deeply human. It speaks to that restless yearning for something else, the feeling that we refuse to sit with—the same impulse that drives us through the turning of samsara. Guterson explores this restlessness without offering a one-size-fits-all resolution. Through the parallel lives of Evelyn and Tsering, he reveals how suffering and aspiration can come together in every attempt to live “the right way.”

But all is not lost. As Evelyn in Transit ends with a poignant epilogue on the fates of Evelyn and Cliff in Nepal, Guterson reminds us that contentment in this life is possible, and often found in the most surprising of circumstances. We’re left with the assurance that our own offbeat wandering, too, may lead us exactly where we need to be.