At one point or another,
everybody wants to get away from it all. But there are levels; one man's long
walk on the beach is another man's faked-death journey into isolation and
backwoods survival. There's a romance to the latter that comes hand-in-glove with
its arrogance, a lure of simplification that implies freedom and a rejection of
social responsibility. The journeys of individuals like Christopher McCandless
(the real-life protagonist of Into The Wild) invite contempt and
admiration in equal measure, but whether they're demonized or worshipped, the
questions they raise remain. What would drive someone to leave everything
behind for isolation, discomfort, and death? And just how broken does society
have to become before such a choice seems like the only sane response?
In his new novel, The
Other,
David Guterson (Snow Falling On Cedars) attempts to address these issues through
the story of two young men going in different directions. The narrator, a
fiftysomething teacher named Neil Countryman, first meets John William Barry at
a track meet when both are in their teens. While John William comes from rich
stock and Neil goes to public school, the two form a fast friendship that has its resiliency tested over the years by
John William's Gnosticism and obsessive intensity. Neil follows the
well-traveled path of college and marriage, but John becomes increasingly
unwilling to live in what he considers a corrupt world. When he takes the final
steps toward exile, Neil has to decide how far he's willing to go to help a
potentially delusional friend.
The Other unfolds at a leisurely
pace, with Neil relating his past anecdote by anecdote, between interjections
from the present. It's an engrossing, complex take on the decisions people
make, and how often those decisions seem less a matter of choice than a matter
of history. Guterson writes beautifully; his descriptions of life in the
wilderness are squalid and haunting, and the empathy he has for his characters
makes those descriptions as personal as they are poetic. Things get a little
shaky in the final pages, with an overlong monologue and an ending that doesn't
conclude the story so much as halt it, but these are minor complaints. The
Other
largely succeeds because it worries less about answers and more about the people
who seek them, and how difficult it is for anyone to disappear completely.