The best novel I’ve read recently is David Guterson’s The Other. I enjoyed two other novels by Guterson, Our Lady of the Forest and Snow Falling on Cedars – and the latter is one of my all-time favorites. While The Other isn’t quite up to the Himalayan standard Guterson set with Cedars, it is nevertheless a powerful work, and I’ve never related so strongly to fictional characters. John William Barry and Neil Countryman, friends in the novel, felt like friends to me as well. In his early twenties, John William concludes that being well-adjusted to a sick society is no sign of health, and he heads for the hills, quite literally. His idealistic extremism reminded me of Christopher McCandless, the young man who starved to death in the Alaska wilderness. McCandless’ story was told movingly in John Krakauer’s book Into the Wild, as well as the Sean Penn film of the same title. Most Alaskans felt nothing but disdain for McCandless, but I saw too much of myself in him – rejecting societal values, searching for purity, heading into the wilderness ill-prepared…Like that young man, I did not realize how unforgiving the Alaska wilderness can be, and I made some mistakes that could have easily killed me. I was lucky and he was not…As for John William Barry, he lives in a small trailer near Washington’s Olympic Mountains, but constructs a cave in the woods when that seems too extravagant. Neil makes the long trek periodically to bring his friend food and other supplies he does not really want, although he accepts them, and their time together is a meditation on friendship and loyalty…Did I mention that John William is heir to a family estate worth hundreds of millions of dollars? And that he wills the money to Neil? That aspect of the plot felt a bit heavy-handed, I must admit, although Guterson was likely drawing on his own experience striking it rich after the success of Cedars…Neil Countryman narrates the novel, and other than the minor detail of the $440 million he inherits, I’ve never identified so completely with a character. Like Countryman, I’ve taken a solitary trek through Europe, taught high school English, hiked extensively in the Cascades, struggled to succeed as a writer – and fallen short of my ideals. “I’m a hypocrite, of course,” he says near the end of the novel. “I live with that, but I live.”