The Other

It is 1972, Neil Countryman is from the public high school in north Seattle. He slumps at his desk all day and gets high in the park at lunchtime. John William Barry is from a private academy for the more privileged of the city's youth. He is an earnest, fiery young man, and his family background is one of material wealth and emotional deprivation. Theirs is a friendship that is both fraught and intimate. Both boys have a taste for the wilderness, and they explore together the most remote areas of the mountains.

But as they grow older, John William's intense intelligence and craving for isolation mark him out as an eccentric, and as Neil begins to accumulate the more conventional comforts - a wife, a steady job - their lives begin to take radically different paths.

Publishers 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. (June)

David Guterson is a reader s writer, welcoming his audience into a story from the first sentence. The rich landscapes of the Pacific Northwest are home to many of Guterson s works of fiction, serving as emotional backdrops for deeply felt stories about the ways we deal with the most universal of questions.