Book Reviews
The sad, enigmatic story of Mr. McCandless was recounted with enormous sympathy and skill by Jon Krakauer in his 1996 book, Into the Wild...[and] Mr. McCandless’s story now seems to have inspired a novel by David Guterson, The Other, which moves the narrative to the author’s native Pacific Northwest.... It’s hard for the reader to understand why Mr. Guterson...would want to reinvent such a well-known and well-told story. And while he has created an engaging enough voice for his narrator, Neil Countryman, much of his novel feels derivative and overly familiar.... Worse, some of the theories advanced in this novel to explain John William’s withdrawal from society seem overly pat and reductive.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Mesmerizing, even heart-breaking...vivid...David Guterson explores the fissures in our divided souls: Attachment vs. alienation; moral behavior vs. expediency; joy vs. suffering.... The Other examines the dilemma that has confounded sages and saints for millennia: whether to engage in our tormented world, or turn our faces from it.... By indelibly capturing the Seattle of the 1970s and ’80s, [the novel] becomes a testament to the city’s breathless transition from a quirky, idiosyncratic town of working- and middle-class families to a metropolis for the nouveau-techno riche.... With fine-grained details, Guterson displays his near-photographic memory for the fading details of our city’s heritage. [He] is equally eloquent on the raw terrain of the Olympic Peninsula.... The Other stayed with this reader for days after finishing the book. [The narrator] Neil Countryman is a rich, complicated Everyman.... And [his best friend] John William must go down as one of the saddest figures in contemporary literature–a bright young man swallowed by his own darkness. Most of us have a friend or loved one who dropped out, checked out and faded away. Could we have saved them? By choosing a different path, have we saved our own skins/souls, or merely preserved them? These are the questions The Other raises. Readers will spend a long time thinking about the answers.
Mary Ann Gwinn - Seattle Times
In 1972, two Seattle teens, working-class Irish boy Neil Countryman and tortured trust funder John William Barry, bond over their love of adventuring in the Northwest’s vast wilderness. Countryman, who continues on to college, marriage, and a career teaching high school English, narrates the story of helping Barry drop out of society to live a hermit’s life ‘without hypocrisy’ in a remote, self-excavated cave. [This plot] is the perfect scaffolding to support Guterson’s absorbing meditation on what it means to grow up, sell out, and lead an honest life.
Entertainment Weekly
Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars) runs out of gas mulling the story of two friends who take divergent paths toward lives of meaning. A working-class teenager in 1972 Seattle, Neil Countryman, a "middle of the pack" kind of guy and the book's contemplative narrator, befriends trust fund kid John William Barry—passionate, obsessed with the world's hypocrisies and alarmingly prone to bouts of tears—over a shared love of the outdoors. Guterson nicely draws contrasts between the two as they grow into adulthood: Neil drifts into marriage, house, kids and a job teaching high school English, while John William pulls an Into the Wild, moving to the remote wilderness of the Olympic Mountains and burrowing into obscure Gnostic philosophy. When John William asks for a favor that will sever his ties to "the hamburger world" forever, loyal Neil has a decision to make. Guterson's prose is calm and pleasing as ever, but applied to Neil's staid personality it produces little dramatic tension. Once the contrasts between the two are set up, the novel has nowhere to go, ultimately floundering in summary and explanation.
Publishers Weekly
In his fourth novel, PEN/Faulkner Award winner Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars) constructs a sensationalistic story that in other hands might have emerged as a page-turning potboiler. Here, events unfold in exquisitely refined prose, which creates a plot as believable as any quotidian workday while evoking an unforgettable sense of place in its depiction of Washington State's wilderness. Middle-aged narrator Neil Countryman, lately the recipient of an enormous and unexpected inheritance, traces the roots of this windfall back to an equally unexpected encounter at age 16 with a fellow runner on a Seattle high school track field. Bonded by a mutual love of the outdoors, working-class Neil and wealthy John William Barry become lifelong friends despite cultural disparities. The bond holds as their adult paths diverge, Neil choosing to teach while John William retreats to a hermit's life in remote woodlands. When Neil agrees to help his friend disappear, haunting questions of values, responsibility, and choice leave Neil-and the readers of this provocative fiction-to ponder the proper definition of a good life. Recommended for most fiction collections.
Starr E. Smith - Library Journal
Guterson’s novel of friendship and ideas is a moving meditation on choices, sacrifices, and compromises made in search of an authentic life. —Kristine Huntley
Booklist
In this philosophically provocative and psychologically astute novel, two boyhood friends take very different paths: The richer one renounces all earthly entanglements, while the poorer one becomes unexpectedly wealthy beyond imagination. Once again, Guterson (Our Lady of the Forest, 2003, etc.) writes of the natural splendor of his native Pacific Northwest, though the ambiguity of isolating oneself in nature, rejecting family and society in the process, provides a tension that powers the narrative momentum to the final pages. There are parallels between this story and Jon Krakauer's nonfiction book Into the Wild, as the novel relates the life and death of John William Barry, whose mother and father come from two of Seattle's wealthiest families, but who forsakes his elite destiny to achieve posthumous notoriety as "the hermit of the Hoh." What distinguishes Guterson's novel is the narrative voice of Neil Countryman (perhaps an unfortunate surname), who has been Barry's best and maybe only friend since the two competed at a track meet. On a hike into the wildness, Barry forces his blue-collar buddy to swear a blood oath never to reveal this secret spot to anyone. That oath is tested when Barry disappears from society and enlists his friend's complicity in covering his tracks. The first one in his family to attend college, Countryman becomes an aspiring writer who supports himself as a high-school English teacher, and who marries and raises a family. Yet if Barry is ostensibly "the other" of the title, so is Countryman, whose bond with a friend who may have a severe (possibly hereditary) psychological disturbance seems stronger than the one he shares with anyone else. Ultimately, Barry rewards Countryman for the latter's complicity in keeping a secret and helping the hermit sustain himself, but the greater reward for Countryman is the material that becomes this book. When a novelist scores as popular a breakthrough as Guterson did with Snow Falling on Cedars, a long shadow is cast over subsequent efforts. Here, he succeeds in outdistancing that shadow.
Kirkus Reviews