The Stranger in the Woods is partly about what it means to be a hermit: Tactically, practically, psychologically. But Finkel’s book is also about what we want from hermits—why we’re endlessly fascinated by them, and why we’re just as often frustrated by them ... Among the more fascinating aspects of his story is just how close he was able to live near civilization, without ever being seen ... Reading The Stranger in the Woods, one is reminded of China Miéville’s sci-fi police procedural, The City and the City, in which two neighboring cities, Bes?el and Ul Qoma, overlap one on top of the other, even though they remain completely separate entities. This separation is maintained via conscious acts of will by the cities’ citizens, who 'unsee' anything that happens in the other city. It is a similar act of will that each of us employs to unsee the world that Knight discovered, even though it’s only a few feet in front of our faces ... Christopher Knight is an anti-Thoreau, and Finkel’s book, an anti-Walden.
It’s campfire-friendly and thermos-ready, easily drained in one warm, rummy slug. It also raises a variety of profound questions — about the role of solitude, about the value of suffering, about the diversity of human needs ... A few sentences in this book are sprayed with that inexplicable men’s-magazine hyperbole cologne ... Finkel, to whom Knight gave stunning access while in jail — especially for a hermit — also does a fine job conveying the idiosyncrasies of his subject’s character ... The Stranger in the Woods is involving and well-told; it certainly casts its spell. But there are inconsistencies in Knight’s story.
This romantic figure, this mysterious man who had abandoned society for the forest, was nothing more than a common thief, stealing blocks of cheese and packages of bacon from little kids. This is the problem with Finkel’s book. Finkel does his best. His writing is vivid and clear, his reporting is diligent. He is careful not to overstep the journalistic boundaries of what he knows...His research is comprehensive. And it leads us — nowhere. There is no big moment when Knight decided to jettison society, no reason that he or anyone else can give for choosing this strange life, no lesson to be learned ... There is no wisdom here. Sometimes a hermit is just a hermit. Sometimes a thief is just a thief. Finkel did his best. The book is interesting, but it is not illuminating.
While we never really find out what compelled Knight to walk into the woods in 1986, we do learn about what life was like for him and how he made it work for all those years. That is a fascinating and, at times, disturbing tale. This story, for the most part, comes completely from Knight himself. Finkel exchanged handwritten letters with Knight while he was jailed and had nine jail visits with him ... The author believes that Knight is 'practically incapable of lying,' but he doesn’t provide enough evidence to support that ... Finkel is a skilled storyteller, and those skills are clearly present in this book as he weaves psychoanalysis and medicine, the mechanics of outdoor survival and centuries of hermit history with Knight’s life story to create a tightly written, compelling narrative ... It may be that [Finkel's] efforts to prove himself a trustworthy journalist led him to insert himself into Knight’s story, or he may have been making a stylistic choice. If so, it was a poor one. Knight’s story is compelling enough to stand on its own.
The Stranger in the Woods started as a 2014 GQ magazine article, and its journey to a petite 200-page book is similar to the one a meatball takes on its way to becoming a meatloaf. There’s something tasty here. There’s also a good deal of filler ... Finkel shrewdly plays the punching bag while Knight alternates between jabs and details ... Only in the epilogue do we learn that author and subject had just nine one-hour prison meetings. It’s the kind of thing readers should know earlier, especially since the poverty of access leads to some bad decisions ... All this seems like obvious padding, but to give Finkel the benefit of the doubt, it may simply be that his affinity for his amazing hermit got the best of him. He does a remarkable job persuading one of the world’s more recalcitrant individuals to open up, but Finkel wants more, and it’s strange that he doesn’t recognize Knight’s limitations.
The intent seems to be to elevate Knight by association into a flawed saint of solitude. But artlessly surrounding him with canonical figures ('He looked a bit like the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy') and hoping for the best isn’t enough to do the trick. One wants the connections to be explored rather than simply raised. More important, you want to be brought, somehow, into the inner reality of Knight’s experience ... more often he’s uncomfortably playing to Finkel’s eagerness for profundity or even more uncomfortably fending it off ... Next to the great fictional solitaries and rejecters of the world – Crusoe, Bartleby, Boo Radley, Kafka’s Hunger Artist, half of Conrad’s protagonists – Finkel’s errant knight cuts a dim figure. There’s no reason to hold that against him. Oblivion appears to have been what he sincerely craved (he eventually sent Finkel packing), and it’s probably what he best deserves.
Finkel, like Alice Walker, writing The Color Purple in the voice of an illiterate teen talking to God, somehow pulls it off. And the hermit’s tale is as unlikely as the book’s success … He reads stolen books, listens to stolen music and keeps to himself. In meeting Knight after his hermitage time ends, Finkel manages to pry powerful words from the man who may hold the world title for silent retreat … If Knight’s withdrawal is inexplicable, Finkel’s connection to him pretty much matches that … Out of those trips, plus a blizzard of research on the history, motivations, cultural influences, neurology and sanity of hermits, came The Stranger in the Woods … In his fascinating story, Michael Finkel not only wrests quotes from the reluctant hermit, he comes up with a number of quotable lines of his own.
Finkel ultimately answers the question of why he was so drawn to this story with more clarity than Knight offers for his motivation in departing society. But that’s not to knock the thorough reporting and the complex account that Finkel delivers about Knight’s life in the woods and its aftermath. It’s hard to imagine a more empathetic portrait of Knight, who, by his own description, was a square peg who fled the world to find a place he could be content. As strong as Finkel’s storytelling instincts and prose are, his greatest feat in writing The Stranger in the Woods is the journalistic diligence and humanity he brought to Knight in the Kennebec County Jail. Through Finkel, Knight is able to speak up with his own voice at last.
