Gridley 2008-08-25
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
When one reads a novel narrated by a peripheral character about another, more luminous personality, the tendency is to compare it to The Great Gatsby and its narrator Nick Carraway. In the case of Guterson's new book, The Other, that comparison quickly becomes an unfair one.
Neil Countryman, from a blue collar family, becomes Carraway here, and Countryman's high school pal, John William Barry, the Gatsby clone, is from a well off, troubled family. At this point, the Gatsby comparison dies on the vine. The novel is at first a coming-of-age novel of the sixties and seventies, as the boys vie in their schools' 880-yard races, take drugs, drink, play pranks, and date. John William becomes something of a high school and college radical, and one would think he'd be fighting girls off with a stick. But his moody mind is elsewhere.
He and Neil begin to explore the virgin forests of the Northwest, taking great risks in this raw terrain. And more and more, John William begins to withdraw from family, school, friends--all normal society. He even tries to push Neil away, but Countryman is too devoted a friend, even following John William into the deep woods to hack out a cave his moody friend plans to live in.
Obviously, the two eventually grow apart, despite Neil's constant attention to John William's new lifestyle. Neil marries and he and wife Jamie begin a family, eventually adopting an affluent bohemian, California-style life.
Then John William dies. The rest of the novel, as Neil and Jamie age, concerns Neil's efforts at coming to grips with his guilt over leaving John William alone in the woods. To complicate this, J.W. has left his pal a few hundred million dollars in his will.
I won't reveal what Guterson intends as spellbinding revelations about the Barry family, things that obviously led J.W. to the woods and an eventual death there. But it's only in the last fifty pages or so that Guterson's story grows meat on its bones.
As first stated, I wanted to see the story--with Neil within the first person peripheral point of view--orchestrated in the manner of Gatsby, but this is patently unfair. There should be any number of ways of using Neil to "discover" his friend. But the plot Guterson chooses leaves John William seeming like he's a cheap, Elvis-on-velvet painting of a sixties character, with Neil fumbling about as his friend without any reason to remain close to the moody hermit.
The result is, to my mind, a rather effete story peopled with prissy characters. As always, though, Guterson is at his best when casting his characters in the grander context of the damp, somber nature of the Northwest woods. In the chapters in which they spend time together in the woods, Guterson's Steinbeck-esque ability with mood is compelling.
His writing has always been uneven, but here, he seems to be going out of his way to deliberately create a literary put-on with The Other, and I don't know why. In a late passage, Neil, an aspiring writer, reveals agent and editorial comments about his writing as pretentious and insipid, these reminding too much of Guterson's own writing in some parts of this book. Put-ons are okay in such writing, I suppose, but in this case--if that's what Guterson's up to--the effort is too self-conscious to work.
