The OtherA Novel

The dark and complex exploration of two lives diverged.
David Guterson is the kind of writer whose novels are shot through with fundamental moral quandaries. In contemplative, psychologically complex passages, Guterson opens his characters like flowers, revealing their deep roots in shared landscapes. The damp, gloomy beauty of the Pacific Northwest permeates his fiction — most notably his Pen/Faulkner award-winning novel Snow Falling on Cedars. His latest novel, The Other, is no exception.

Neil Countryman was born to working-class Irish parents and dreams of becoming a writer; John William Barry is heir to the fortunes of two eminent Seattle families — an inheritance he feels desperate to outrun. The two boys meet at a high school track meet and slowly develop a friendship based on their mutual affection for the Pacific Northwest wilderness. As they mature, though, they choose divergent paths. Barry drops out of college, employs Countryman in a conspiracy to help him go missing, and sets about hollowing out a limestone cave deep in the wilderness in order to escape the entrapments of what he calls “hamburger world.” Countryman, on the other hand, graduates college, settles down and becomes a teacher — all the while making supply runs to the cave and faithfully keeping his friend’s secret — a decision that has profound and dire consequences for both.

Like Snow Falling on Cedars, The Other's central theme is that everyone, at his heart, is unknowable and alone. Countryman's plodding teaching career becomes his own kind of psychological cave where he guards the secret about his friend, in part because his complicity gives him a vicarious purpose. Barry's obsession with Gnosticism — an ideology that rejects the material world — borders on lunacy, hinting at some deeper crisis of identity for the wealthy hermit.

Sometimes, a novel is so completely realized that it feels more like nonfiction; The Other is that kind of book. No character is simple enough for easy judgments. Like a modern-day Hawthorne, Guterson uses the novel to pose intense moral dilemmas, not to resolve them. Any answers are ours alone.