Jews adopt less frequently than other groups, Guterson believes and, in Dan and Alice's case, their decision is preceded by careful weighing of their lefty-secular values against an inherited sense of their being the Chosen People. They end up sending Ed to Hebrew school and having him barmitzvah-ed along with their birth son, Simon.
In his own life, in addition to four biological children, Guterson and his wife have a 12-year-old daughter adopted from Ethiopia. Adoption raised fascinating issues for the author, but it was elsewhere that the novel's inspiration lay.
"This story started with some questions that I had about blindness - not literal lack of vision but blindness to self, our human inability to see ourselves clearly.
"I was reminded that Sophocles' Oedipus Rex worked very much with this motif, and that's when it occurred to me that maybe there was a way to tell this story in contemporary terms."
As nature and nurture conspire to catapult Ed to the giddy zeniths of a tech tycoon, Greek mythology's preoccupation with fate rubs flint-like against the Judaic doctrine of chosenness.
"I felt I could mine my own experience and address elements of latent hubris that are potentially there when you promote this sense of being among the elect," Guterson says, recalling that, in his upbringing, that specialness was illustrated by the likes of Irving Berlin and Sigmund Freud.
Speaking of Freud, the novel does not shy away from the more murderous and salacious aspects of Sophocles' story, either. Without issuing a spoiler alert, let's just say that Ed has a wild adolescence and develops a taste for older women.
Though Guterson still chats with a teacher's patience decades after quitting the classroom, his unease about being identified as a Jewish-American author is insistent. "The question opens the door to a lot of complex issues about how writers are identified and for what purpose. In my case, I've never very strongly identified as a Jewish-American."
Be that as it may, the one character he found himself having almost too much fun with was Alice King's "Pop", whose old-timer wisdom is laden with pungent Yiddishisms. "I had to rein myself in," Guterson laughs. It's just possible he is more of a Jewish-American novelist than he realises.
