The Road Not Taken (The Australian, 7/06/2008)

David Guterson, The Other
Bloomsbury; $32.95; 256pp

There are conspicuous affinities between David Guterson and the principal character in his new novel, The Other. For one thing, both are English teachers, or rather they were, before they became famous. For another, both are Pacific Northwesters – residents, specifically, of Washington State, the landscape and flora of which they know well and celebrate in fine, fastidious prose. Finally, and most importantly perhaps, both Guterson and his fictional protagonist are novelists. Here, however, the similarities end. For whereas Neil Countryman is losing his hair and took seven years to complete his first novel, Guterson, locks bouncing, tossed his off in five.

That novel, of course, was Snow Falling on Cedars (1994) and the general feeling among readers and critics was that its composition was five years well spent. A post-war tale of murder and prejudice set on an island in Puget Sound, it seemed to meld the small-town focus and big-theme moralism of Harper Lee with the attention to detail of James A. Michener. Awards, fame and riches followed, as did two, less well received novels: East of the Mountains (1999) and Our Lady of the Forest (2003). Set, like Snow, in Washington State, these novels marked a shift away from social themes to spiritual ones. East of the Mountains, as its title suggests, drove us east of the Cascade Range to the apple orchards of the Columbia Basin and into the world of a terminally ill doctor contemplating suicide, while Our Lady of the Forest steered us back west and into the mind of a troubled teenager who claims to have been visited by the Virgin Mary. Both of these themes – self-extinction and religion – weigh heavily on Guterson’s latest novel, which is possibly his most personal yet.

It is the story of an unusual relationship – a relationship, as the title implies, that is, in some ways, symbiotic (‘the other’ is a philosophical term used to describe a person or group against which one’s own identity is defined). Neil attends a public school and is descended from solidly blue-collar stock. John William Barry is a prep school student whose family has made a fortune from timber. Despite these differences in background, however, Neil and John William seem to connect. They meet ‘running track’ in North Seattle, Neil, the narrator, describing John William in terms that, possibly a little too obviously, alert the reader to the novel’s subtext: ‘like me, long-haired; like me, in earnest; like me, goaded forward by, the word might be, convictions. In other words, this runner is approximately my doppelgänger’.

The two friends take to mountain climbing and walking in the Washington State woods. John William, however, becomes increasingly insular. He develops an obsession with Gnosticism, the view of God as a sinister deity ‘who can only be transcended by defiance of his commandments’. Eventually, he drops out of education and takes to the forest for the rest of his life. It is giving nothing away to add that this turns out to be not long at all, since he is, as it were, dead on arrival: news of his demise is given up front, as, indeed, is the information that he has left his friend nearly half a billion dollars.

If Snow Falling on Cedars was (in part) a whodunit, then The Other is a whydeedoit. Why did John William take to the forest? Whence came his obsession with the Gnostics? How responsible were his parents for his plight? John William’s mother, Ginnie Barry, is, by more than one account, a pretty useless specimen, happier with her head in a book of poems than tending to her troubled son. This, perhaps, explains why John William is so suspicious of literature, a suspicion explored sympathetically, if a little masochistically, by Guterson. Neil, who dreams of being a writer, leads a kind of vicarious existence, committing particular events to memory even as they’re taking place. An unhealthy detachment from experience is implied, a detachment metaphorically figured by the hundred ‘Death Mask of Shakespeare’ bookplates that his wife, Jamie, gives him one Christmas. ‘The Road Not Taken’ by Robert Frost, with whom Neil has an ‘annual date’ in his (adult) capacity as an English teacher, makes more than one appearance in the novel. But here, the road ‘less travelled by’ is not the literary one taken by Frost: it is the elemental one taken by John William. Try as he might to shake the feeling, Neil experiences this choice as a judgement.

Does Guterson feel something similar? If he does, he certainly hides it well. Though at times The Other feels a little contrived, it is always engaging and frequently moving. Moreover, it is extraordinarily well written. As always, Guterson’s descriptions of nature are worth the admission price alone. ‘Notable, too, is the silence here, broken infrequently by the winter wren’s trill – reminiscent of a hysterically played flute – at other times by the ventriloquy of ravens.’ Is the world a prison for our souls? John William says it is. Guterson’s prose begs to differ.