John William Barry, the central figure in the fourth novel by David Guterson, the author of Snow Falling on Cedars, is the sort of intense young man who is easier to admire than like. Born into a vastly wealthy Seattle dynasty, he began to show distinct signs of rebellion as a teenager, an apostasy that deepened when he dropped out of college and wandered into the rugged mountains of Washington State to become a hermit. For the next seven years, until his lonely death, he conducted a life that could not have been more at odds with his $400m personal fortune, eating whatever food he could scavenge, carving a dwelling out of a limestone cliff with a pickaxe, and avoiding contact with everyone except a lone friend.

That friend is the novel’s narrator, Neil Countryman, a working-class boy who met John William as the two vied for last place in a half-mile race in high school. The novel opens 34 years after the race, just as Neil learns that he has inherited John William’s entire fortune, even though it has been more than two decades since his friend’s death. Consumed by a deep if mysterious guilt, he decides to set the record straight about the troubled young man.

Abandoning his job as a high-school English teacher, Neil first meets Cindy Saperstein, John William’s former college flame. A fledgling screenwriter who wants to turn the hermit’s life into a script, she describes a young man whose fascination with gnosticism led him to an increasingly ascetic lifestyle. Cindy’s description of an early date is unintentionally hilarious: “Sitting on a log in [the college's] wet canyon with its vista of a marsh of rotting alders, he argued, aloud, with long-forgotten Carpocratians instead of making normal young-male advances.”

Cindy, clearly a normal young female with no time for Carpocratians, or any other gnostic sect, eventually dumped John William, causing him to flee into the wild, where Neil helped him cover his tracks so he could not be found by his hated parents. Although the friends’ times together possessed at first an air of Boy’s Own adventure – they even became blood brothers – John William soon entered a precipitous decline. Like Christopher McCandless in Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, he was singularly unprepared to live off the land. (At one point, he failed miserably at gutting a dead elk, proving himself to be, if nothing else, no Sarah Palin.) Neil, meanwhile, settled down to a life of his own, complete with wife, children and a steady job. Their friendship became increasingly strained until the day when Neil felt compelled once again to help his closest friend vanish, this time for good.

John William’s story is potentially intriguing, but, like its hero, The Other is a lot easier to admire than like. There’s no doubting the seriousness of Guterson’s intentions – it oozes from every line of his prose like sweat produced by noble labour. Unfortunately, that labour must be shared by the reader. “Of course, the recalcitrance of stone doesn’t need elaboration,” Neil tells us while describing his cave-building with John William. He then proceeds to elaborate anyway, telling us that “there’s a reason why dynamite’s the tool of choice among miners. Limestone can be pulverised to make a soil amendment, but that doesn’t mean it’s amenable to force. A pick’s point will fatigue in a long match with rock”. And so on, until it is the reader who begins to feel pulverised.

This narrative stodginess might be forgivable if the book contained a compelling story, but the plot remains as recalcitrant as, well, stone. Once you get past John William’s wilderness folly, there’s nothing particularly compelling about his rebellion. Although Neil’s investigation into his friend’s life leads him eventually to blame the hermit’s doom on inept parents, particularly his monstrous mother, this seems a facile, unsatisfying answer to why a bright and entitled young man would throw everything away for such an ignominious form of self-obliteration. As for John William’s dabbling with gnosticism, Chinese poetry and haiku, these also shed precious little light, serving instead as little more than dressing for what could have been a revealing window into a young man’s soul.