Bloomsbury
Review by Brian Tanguay
At various points in this remarkable account of friendship and mental illness, I had to remind myself that I was reading nonfiction. So vivid is the narrative that I found myself returning to Chris Lockhart’s notes about how the book came about, the methods he employed to capture the several voices of his friend Michael Dodd. While Michael’s quest to heal himself from a lifetime of trauma makes up most of the book, this is also Lockhart’s story, his own quest to answer questions about his choices, restlessness and attraction to places in collapse or dire distress. These two strands blend together, become inseparable.
“I have known Michael for over thirty years now,” Lockhart writes in the Preface, “and, like most friendships that have spanned across such a long period of time, it has been an on-again, off-again affair but one that has always been honest and genuine.”
Michael Dodd emerges as a fascinating and complex character, a savant of the forests, valleys and rivers of the Olympic Peninsula, a Marine combat veteran, an inveterate collector of books and maps, fishing tackle; he’s an untameable personality. He’s also afflicted with DID, or dissociative identity disorder, once known as multiple personality disorder. When we first meet him, Michael is confined to Western State Hospital, a psychiatric facility, as a “forensic commitment patient,” meaning his stay was ordered by a judge. Western State is a grim place. What Michael wants from Chris is help writing his story. “Michael’s therapists were saying that he needed to gain some kind of clarity by finding his voice, creating his story, and putting it down on paper.” Though he had no training as a psychologist or psychiatrist, Chris agrees and the two begin an intense collaboration.
I will note that this is a story about men. Other than the brief appearance of Michael’s ex-wife, and his therapist, there are no significant relationships with women. Traveling around the Peninsula, hiking and fishing, talking endlessly, Chris becomes familiar with Michael’s alts, in particular John Knowles, an aggressive version of Michael, mysterious and somewhat unpredictable. Where Michael is rambling, stream-of-consciousness, discursive, John Knowles is curt and direct. On their first meeting they drive around the small town of Hoquiam, looking at empty buildings, shuttered stores, and the long defunct Harbor Paper mill, once the town’s economic heart. Pointing at junked cars, rotting mobile homes, and meth labs, John Knowles utters, “blight,” and “wasteland.” Economic abandonment is an important backdrop of the book, the result of a half century of cutthroat neoliberal policies that have hollowed out small towns all across America. Hoquiam. Aberdeen. Cosmopolis. In Lockhart’s narrative, the results of economic decisions made in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles are made visible. Hardship, want and alienation are pervasive in a region of overwhelming natural beauty.
Can these men help one another mend their broken parts? I won’t disclose much more because readers deserve to take the trip and find out for themselves. This beautifully written book works on many levels, speaks eloquently and at times mournfully about what America has become in the first decades of the twenty-first century, how easily people and entire regions are abandoned and forgotten. But it also stands as a paean to the reparative power of nature, big skies, trees and rivers. Ultimately, American Alt testifies to how much we all need someone to lean on in this chaotic and often brutal world.
