The Other
by David Guterson
Bloomsbury, HK$200
Years ago, in a book called Love and Death in the American Novel, literary critic Leslie A. Fiedler suggested that at the obsessive heart of the American experience there lies a complicated masculine relationship between a white boy and a dark outsider. Fiedler's favourite examples were the friendship between Ishmael and the harpooner Queequeg in Moby-Dick and between Huckleberry Finn and the black slave Jim.
David Guterson, best known for the excellent Snow Falling on Cedars, plays a variation on this theme in The Other. It begins in the 1960s with the meeting between two Seattle teenagers, Neil Countryman and John William Barry, and it ends in the present day, with Neil coming to terms with his friend's legacy - in several senses - a quarter of a century after John's death in the forest wilderness of Washington state, where he had been living for years as a hermit.
John is not a born outsider. Neil's background is working class, but his friend is heir to an elite and wealthy Seattle family. As the drama of their friendship develops, John becomes increasingly alienated from everything his family stands for and increasingly eccentric. Bloody-mindedness leads him in due course to decide to turn his back on the amenities and compromises of modern American life and live in a cave - excavated, with great difficulty, from the limestone cliff - in the remote forests he has explored with Neil.
The only people who know where John is, and that he is alive, are Neil and his wife.