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A review by hannahstohelit
The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel
adventurous
reflective
fast-paced
4.0
I read this on the recommendation of a friend, and while I did really enjoy it... I didn't need Finkel to write that the book was an extension of a longform article for me to sense it. It was good, but felt a bit more insubstantial than I'd have expected from something published in book form. Longform articles often have these kinds of digressions into the history and sociology of the topic being covered, and in book form I'm not sure that we benefit from having it in the long run. We end up with lots of information about anchorites and such and don't feel, at the end of the day, like we know a whole lot more about Christopher Knight than people who read that original article did.
In the context of an article that may be a long-form human interest piece but is also current enough to be news, that makes sense- Finkel was taking a current event of human interest, giving more information about it, and contextualizing it, and when one only has a few months to write it, the lack of a fully fledged narrative makes sense. Published as a book three years later, and read by me eight years after that (though that's hardly Finkel's fault), the piece's attempt to pad things out and follow up feels more voyeuristic precisely because there's so little information, and precisely because that lack of information is because of Knight's lack of interest any longer in being a story. I think Finkel sensed that, as a book, it would have been more satisfying narratively if Knight had gone back into the woods or ended his life rather than the prosaic truth that he just went back into his previous life and made it one day at a time. That, in itself, seems like the harder thing for Knight given what we come to know of him, and if anything it felt like Finkel was attempting to stir the pot. Not necessarily to make Knight DO anything, but to make him, the post-arrest him, seem interesting again.
So that's the one star off- otherwise, the book was interesting and vivid, a view into a man who led a very interesting 28 years on his own. I perhaps was a bit too harsh on Finkel's descriptions of other forms of hermits- it does, actually, seem helpful to contextualize Knight among others who have lived on their own but off of humanity, personally but not societally separated. A man who can speak to only one person in nearly thirty years but watch/listen to the entirety of Seinfeld in that time is very different than one who spends those years in the middle of the forest living on mushrooms and wild game, and in some ways it was that very liminality of the space that he carved out for himself that made him most interesting.
In the context of an article that may be a long-form human interest piece but is also current enough to be news, that makes sense- Finkel was taking a current event of human interest, giving more information about it, and contextualizing it, and when one only has a few months to write it, the lack of a fully fledged narrative makes sense. Published as a book three years later, and read by me eight years after that (though that's hardly Finkel's fault), the piece's attempt to pad things out and follow up feels more voyeuristic precisely because there's so little information, and precisely because that lack of information is because of Knight's lack of interest any longer in being a story. I think Finkel sensed that, as a book, it would have been more satisfying narratively if Knight had gone back into the woods or ended his life rather than the prosaic truth that he just went back into his previous life and made it one day at a time. That, in itself, seems like the harder thing for Knight given what we come to know of him, and if anything it felt like Finkel was attempting to stir the pot. Not necessarily to make Knight DO anything, but to make him, the post-arrest him, seem interesting again.
So that's the one star off- otherwise, the book was interesting and vivid, a view into a man who led a very interesting 28 years on his own. I perhaps was a bit too harsh on Finkel's descriptions of other forms of hermits- it does, actually, seem helpful to contextualize Knight among others who have lived on their own but off of humanity, personally but not societally separated. A man who can speak to only one person in nearly thirty years but watch/listen to the entirety of Seinfeld in that time is very different than one who spends those years in the middle of the forest living on mushrooms and wild game, and in some ways it was that very liminality of the space that he carved out for himself that made him most interesting.