FICTION

Working-class Neil Countryman and super-wealthy John William Barry, the two friends whose relationship fuels David Guterson's elegiac novel, "The Other," meet at a Seattle high school track event in 1972. Despite the disparity in their socioeconomic backgrounds, Countryman finds Barry similar enough to consider him, at first glance, his doppelganger.

They hike in the Pacific Northwest and smoke pot together (it is the 1970s, after all), but as they enter college, the two men's lives begin to diverge.

Barry becomes engrossed in Gnosticism, a dualistic religion that claims that an evil god holds our souls trapped in the physical world. In time, Barry drops out of college and takes up residence first in a remote mobile home and then in a cave he excavates himself, with the help of a bemused Countryman.

"A college dropout who becomes a barefoot trailer-denizen, a child of advantage who turns to simplicity: that wasn't such an unusual progression in the era of Gerald Ford, when the American woods were still full of young philosophers and Vietnam vets -- some of whom looked like Johnny Appleseed," says Countryman, who narrates the novel.

Countryman takes a more conventional road into middle age. On a poor-man's version of the Grand Tour of Europe, he meets the woman who will become his wife. They return to Seattle, where he becomes an English teacher, a father and a contented homeowner.

Countryman's path of middle-class compromise should lead smoothly into quiet retirement. Not surprisingly, Barry's idealistic quest to break free from society doesn't end as well.

Countryman finds him lying dead in his fire pit, after living several years as a hermit in the wilderness.

"He'd burned in his own fire, why or how I'll never know, though I could speculate that, weakened by hunger, he'd stumbled, maybe, and that -- maybe or maybe not -- this stumbling was suicide," Countryman tells us.

Sometime later, a lawyer announces that Countryman is the sole heir to Barry's estate. And we're not talking about a begging bowl and a few monk's robes, either.

From leading a quiet life of compromise (complete with an unfinished novel in his desk drawer), Countryman suddenly finds himself worth $440 million.

Washington, home to Bill Gates and Microsoft Corp., is full of millionaires, but Countryman, descended from "nail bangers," is now the state's 19th-richest person.

This isn't the sort of novel that shows us the newly minted millionaire Countryman indulging in spending sprees or setting up foundations to save the world, though. In fact, Guterson, author of the best-selling "Snow Falling on Cedars," wastes little time exploring what Countryman will do with his windfall.

Instead, Guterson spends much of the novel looking back at the friends' relationship.

If Guterson had written "The Other" from Barry's perspective instead of having Countryman narrate the story, it would have been a different beast altogether. As an account of a self-taught Gnostic's spiritual journey, it would have offered readers a stubbornly lonely course, with little room for the human interaction that drives traditional novels.

Guterson's choice of narrator was wise. We may be moved by Barry's quest for salvation, but he remains an intriguing cipher. It's Countryman in his role as Everyman, balancing idealism and compromise, that makes "The Other" so appealing.
Doug Childers is a Richmond writer and edits WAG, a literary Web site at www.thewag.net.