Inevitably, David Guterson's new novel, "The Other," will be compared to "Snow Falling on Cedars," his spare, evocative 1994 debut about vivid characters caught in the aftermath of racial injustice.
And, inevitably, those comparisons will take the form of "It's no 'Snow Falling on Cedars.' " Indeed, "The Other" is a flat-footed morass of trivia that suggests a bad rewrite of "Into the Wild."
During a high school track meet in 1972, Neil Countryman, the son of a carpenter, meets John William Barry, the scion of several prominent and wealthy Seattle families. Neil is an unmotivated half-miler who runs "on unfocused emotion." John William is "the brooder in the back row. The rich kid who hates and loves himself equally. The contrarian who hears his conscience calling in the same way schizophrenics hear voices, so that, for him, there's no not listening."
Despite those unprepossessing evaluations, the boys become fast friends, hiking, talking, smoking dope and getting into mischief.
After college, John William grows increasingly alienated, he spends more and more time alone in the woods. He digs a cave in a mountainside and gradually refuses to leave its isolation, even to buy supplies.
Neil treks in food, books, booze, dirty magazines and dope -- when what his friend obviously needs is professional help. Neil also keeps John William's whereabouts hidden.
When John William dies of unspecified causes (malnutrition? pneumonia? boredom? flagrant plot device?), Neil wraps the body in a cedar mat and hides it in the cave.
He says nothing about the death until rangers find the body 22 years later. Then Neil discovers John William has left him $440 million.
The money has apparently been sitting for two decades, as no one's bothered to have John William declared dead. Nor do the local law enforcement agencies care that the last person who saw John William Barry alive benefited very handsomely from his demise: "As it turned out, no prosecutor was angry with me for failing to report the death of a missing person or for interring my friend in a cave twenty-two years ago, so I was rich with no strings attached."
Although the novel hinges on that fortune, none of the characters seems very interested in it. Suddenly rolling in dough, Neil purchases . . . a hybrid car. He and his wife quit their jobs, but they stay in their funky old bungalow, while earning more than $60,000 a day in interest and dividends.
