IN college, I had a friend named Kurt. A lot of people know someone like Kurt in college - brilliant, obsessive and kind of scary. He stayed up 72 hours reading Goethe. He filled a 50-page notebook with tiny scrawled notes about Henry James. (These weren't class assignments.) He loved absolute principles and what he called "the timeless." He railed against hypocrisy. He liked to stand outside fraternities and shout lines from Byron. When a poem offended him, he ate it - crumple, chew, swallow - and ended up with an intestinal blockage. My friends and I loved Kurt, and we worried about him. "The Other" is a novel about a Kurt who goes off the rails and ends up living as a hermit in a remote forest in Washington State. The author is David Guterson, of "Snow Falling on Cedars" fame. The recluse is John William Barry, sole heir to a banking and timber fortune. John William, as his friends call him, is as old-school Seattle as it gets. His great-great-grandfather was a member of the Denny Party, whose members founded the city in 1851. In the Northwest, this is akin to May-flower lineage. John William is a smart, troubled rich kid who loathes phonies and sellouts, beginning with his own "weaseling, demonic forefathers." He's the kind of guy who drops acid and chants, "No escape from the unhappiness machine." John William tries to escape the machine by taking the hermit's path, holing up in the woods for seven long, cold, lonely years. In "The Other," the hermit's story is told in retrospect by his best friend, Neil Countryman, an English teacher who emerges as the book's most interesting character. They'd make a good buddy movie, Countryman and the hermit. They meet at a high school track meet in 1972. John William runs for Lakeside, Seattle's elite prep school (and Bill Gates's alma mater). Countryman, the son of a carpenter, runs for Roosevelt, a working-class public school. Like many wealthy, virile boys in Seattle, John William tests himself by climbing in the Cascades, where he and Countryman forge a friendship through wilderness-survival adventures. They also smoke a lot of dope around a lot of campfires as John William blathers on about Gnosticism and teases Countryman about his dream of becoming a writer. "'Lackey,' he would say, about half sardonically. 'Fame and money for prostituting your soul. Minister of Information for the master class.'" Trustafarians like John William usually grow out of their Prince Hal phase by their mid-20s, in plenty of time to make partner in Dad's firm by 35. Not John William. He drops out of college, buys a mobile home, parks it by a remote river on the Olympic Peninsula and spends his days reading Gnostic theology. When even that seems too decadent, he carves a cave out of limestone and retreats into the gloom. While John William builds a cave, Neil Countryman builds a life. He gets married, buys a house, has kids. But he never abandons John William. Countryman treks through dense forest to bring his friend food and medicine. He and the hermit conspire to fake John William's disappearance in Mexico, to give him some relief from his worried parents. After a while, Countryman realizes his old friend isn't going to grow out of this Han-Shan-in-the-cave period. "So what, exactly, is the deal with you?" Countryman asks during an exasperated moment. John William's answer: "I don't want to participate." But Countryman keeps pressing. "Idiot," John William finally replies. "You've got your whole life in front of you, maybe 50 or 60 years. And what are you going to do with that? Be a hypocrite, entertain yourself, make money and then die?" Well, yes. "The Other" is a moving portrait of male friendship, the kind that forms on the cusp of adulthood and refuses to die, no matter how maddening the other guy turns out to be. It's also a finely observed rumination on the necessary imperfection of life - on how hypocrisy, compromise and acceptance creep into our lives and turn strident idealists into kind, loving, fully human adults. Wisdom isn't the embrace of everything we rejected at 19. It's the understanding that absolutes are for dictators and fools. "I'm a hypocrite, of course," Countryman says, reflecting on his own life and John William's doomed pursuit of purity. "I live with that, but I live." David Guterson broke out of the box nearly 15 years ago with his wildly successful debut novel. Neither of his subsequent novels, "East of the Mountains" and "Our Lady of the Forest," has matched that first book's sales, but here's the admirable thing: His books keep getting better. There's a deus ex machina at the end of this new one that, a little disappointingly, plants guilt for John William's struggles at the feet of a certain suspect. But the voice of Neil Countryman is that of a good, thoughtful man coming into middle-class, middle-aged fullness, and his recollections of life in Seattle have a wonderful richness and texture. This Seattle isn't just a trendy backdrop peopled with Starbucks-sippers at the Pike Place Market. Guterson's characters live in the city as it really is. They grab fish and chips at Spud on Green Lake, browse for used books at Shorey's, trip on the mushrooms that grow wild in Ravenna Park. Guterson knows Seattle the way Updike knows small-town Pennsylvania, and there are moments in "The Other" that have a "Rabbit at Rest" quality, as tossed-off observations and bits of dialogue capture the essence of a place and a time. In the early years of his friendship with John William, Countryman wanders through the Barry home, a Laurelhurst Tudor, noticing the white-bellied nudes on the bathroom wallpaper - I've been in that house, or at least its neighbor. Decades later, he listens to his son suggesting they eat at a new brewpub that specializes in mussels and frites - I've been there, too. The beauty is that Guterson doesn't stop to explain. He just drops in these pitch-perfect notes and keeps the music going. Bruce Barcott is the author of "The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw." He fives in Seattle.

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. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Neil keeps mum when friend John William decides to ditch civilization and go into the wild, but he's less sure about helping him disappear completely. With an eight-city tour; reading group guide. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Adult/High School-Blue-collar Neil Countryman meets Seattle blue-blood John William Barry while running track. The novel opens with a lot of references to 1970s pop culture: television shows such as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Get Smart, and athletes and celebrities like Steve Prefontaine, Carl Lewis, the Doobie Brothers, and Gerald Ford. Guterson describes Neil and John William's generation as "slightly late for the zeal of the sixties and slightly early for disco." He depicts a 34-year friendship that survives their many differences. It starts out with a shared love of nature, running, and hiking the Olympic Mountains. But as they mature, the men drift in different directions. As the first Countryman to attend college, Neil takes his education seriously and chooses a traditional life. In contrast, John William drops out of school, decries hypocrisy, studies philosophic thought (most notably Gnosticism), and retreats into a life in the Olympic forest, in a bit of a Thoreau-like existence. His mental state is most certainly fragile, likely inherited from his mother. But in spite of their differences, Neil honors their "blood pact," hiking in food, supplies, and companionship, and, most importantly, he honors John William's desire to keep his location a secret. The 1970s setting will hook teens in the opening, and the lyrical description of the Olympic Mountains forest will keep them reading. The biggest draw, however, will be the themes of friendship and loyalty, and how they survive through the years.-Paula Dacker, Charter Oak High School, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars, 1995) follows two friends as their lives take different courses. Neil Countryman and John William Barry meet at a high-school track event in the 1970s. Neil, a working-class boy constantly running races he knows he'll lose, and John William, a wealthy, misunderstood only child obsessed with Gnosticism, forge an unlikely friendship over trips into the wilds of Washington state. While Neil embarks on a traditional life, attending college and backpacking in Europe, John William retreats from society, excavating a cave in the Hoh Valley, where he hopes to live free from the pressures of modern civilization. Once Neil realizes that his friend is serious about his Thoreauesque endeavor, he sets about helping John William, bringing him food and books and becoming an accomplice in his plan to conceal his whereabouts from his family. As the story shifts between past and present, Neil tries desperately to understand the friend he feels responsibility for even as their lives drastically diverge. Dense but involving, Guterson's novel of friendship and ideas is a moving meditation on choices, sacrifices, and compromises made in search of an authentic life.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2008 Booklist