So why would an intelligent twenty-year-old man one day decide to chuck everything, walk into the woods of Maine–and then stay there for twenty-seven years? It’s tempting to see the solipsistic retreat as a manifestation of childhood trauma and/or mental illness, but that’s not the case. The hermit, Christopher Knight, simply prefers to be alone, even if that means having to steal food from lake-district cabins and almost freezing to death in the harsh Maine winters.
Finkel’s greatest achievement in this book is his avoidance of the sensational and his respect for the man’s story. There are no pat summations, no aha moments. Instead, there’s an objective portrait of a real-life Bartleby who, for better or for worse, lives the only way he knows how to. It’s a thought-provoking story. Reviewed on April 29, 2021