Book Review, Michael Finkel's The Stranger in the Woods

Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods, 2017. New York: Alfred P. Knopf.

Book Review by Myna german

 “Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition,” wrote the Mexican poet and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz. (p. 190, Finkel)

All the time alone is feeling like solitude to me, a retreat being cut off from the world.  Not being able to have my normal routines and see friends and colleagues feels like a form of torture. In “The Stranger in the Woods,” a 20-year-old from Massachusetts drives up to where his family summered in Maine, stakes out a hidden property and pitches his tent. What he thought would be an adolescent stunt of defiance and withdrawal turns out to be his life for thirty years. It is a Thoreau-type experiment, but as the author points out, even Thoreau held dinner parties and was seen strolling around Concord downtown now and then.

Finkel, the author himself, lives in sparsely-settled western Montana, but once the hermit is caught (he supported himself by stealing food, books, clothing from vacant summer cottages at night) he develops a suprising friendship with this semi-autistic man who has stayed away from civilization because he thought it was “phony.” These are not the hermit’s words but a synopsis relying on The Catcher in the Rye’s  antihero who thought adults were phony. 

The hermit’s name is Ronald Knight and he thought he was living the noble life of contemplative withdrawal partly in protest of societal norms but partly due to a post-adolescent psychic crisis that became a routine and he could not shake.

The place in the woods, stocked with propane tanks for cooking and minimal heat, plenty of reading material, enabled him to talk to no one for thirty years. Awakening and being caught, jailed temporarily, released on parole brought him back into the human race, along with mandatory therapy. It’s a Rip Van Winkle story and a very compelling read.

I delved back into it after a hiatus and it was equally good the second, the poignant parts. It is very topical as we withdraw into what is a semi-silent world broken up by telephonic conversations and Zoom calls. The hermit did not have a cell phone or any of these contraptions. He was content with his own company. Wish I could be. But the withdrawal has forced me to think about what is really important and the time alone or just in solitude with my husband continues. It’s a forced hiatus or withdrawal. The hermit’s was voluntary. It’s a time of deep seclusion—whether we like it or not.