The Other

I love when books I read tie into one another without any intentional effort on my part. In the case of David Guterson's book, The Other, the tie-in is more humorous than actual since its story of rich kid-turned-recluse takes place in the same general area as Twilight. The story is too serious for me to have spent much time worrying about John William being stalked by vampires, but it did cross my mind. It's also a book about hiking--extreme hiking, in some ways--and that evoked The Honorable Bandit. The narrator even talks about why he hikes, why that urge to "put one foot in front of the other." Nice and tidy, my reading is.

The Other seems like Guterson's way of squaring away the true story of Chris McCandless that Jon Krakauer covered so well in Into the Wild. Not that I've read that, of course, because as much as I love Jon Krakauer's writing, I also love to limit my exposure to overly depressing topics like young men dying of starvation in the Alaskan woods for no particular reason. I didn't see the movie either. As I read The Other, I felt like Guterson had been trying to process the idea of an uber-wealthy young man who rejects all worldy goods and comforts and takes to the woods. I felt almost that he'd had to write a fictional version in order to square away the true story.


The story is narrated by Neil Countryman, John Williams class antithesis and his only apparent friend. Neil is John William's enabler--for better and probably for worse. He aids and abets John William's gradual disappearance into the wilds of the Northwest, hiking periodically in to his cave dwelling with trappings of what JW calls "hamburger world." Not that JW rejects the ramen noodles, bacon, eggs, Doritoes, etc... On the contrary, he wolfs them down, but as he does so, Neil looks around his increasingly eccentric friend's woodland home and envies how capable and accomplished JW has become at living off the land. Looking at his woven baskets, Neil says," They were so neatly done, so adroitly crafted, that I felt bad abut myself just looking at them. Here he'd been going competently native, under those trees and in these woods, while I'd been analyzing "Gerontion" in a college library carrel."


Because over the course of their friendship, Neil, against the seeming odds, is the one who goes to college, travels the world, becomes educated, while it is JW who seems to be slipping back into the "simpler" life of Neil's working-class roots. JW mocks his friend constantly for having given into the easy contentment of the material world, He derides him for failing to write thatGreat American Novel he's always on about. JW implies that he himself is living the real life while Neil fritters away his life--in fact, sleepwalks through it.


But of course, it's hard to ignore that JW is not that mentally balanced either. Neil tries hard to ignore the evidence and remains loyal to the end. I suppose we're supposed to see the irony in Neil becoming a "real" writer at the cost of his friend, becoming rich off of John Williams hyper-intellectual torment, but some of that gets lost because all talk of novels and movies based on John William's hermit life made me think of Jon Krakauer and the subsequent movie of Into the Wild. Yeah, I thought, it's been done. When Neil protests, "they'll never make a movie about a hermit" I thought that was a little cheap of Guterson, because, yeah they will. They did. And your book was published after that.


So, read this if you are still trying to wrap your head around Into the Wild. Or if you've ever thought about running away from it all. Or if you've ever fantasized about coming into an unexpected fortune. Or, even, if you want to know more about Gnosticism than anybody really needs to know.


Image I related to and made me read the whole book for the writing: Losing [a race] is like knowing that, in the movie scene where a thousand die but the hero lives, you're one of the obliterated.