Into The Wild Ronald Franz

INTO THE WILD
By Jon Krakauer.
207 pp. New York: Villard Books. $22.

The strangely fascinating hero of Jon Krakauer's strangely fascinating book ''Into the Wild'' is a fellow who starved to decease in the Alaskan wilderness in the summer of 1992. That is the starting point of a narrative that seeks to find out why we should care.

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An electrician who had picked him upward four miles out of Fairbanks pressed a pair of rubber boots and two sandwiches on the dangerously underequipped but charming hitchhiker, who would vouchsafe no name but Alex. His parents had named him Christopher McCandless, but in his travels he preferred the invented identity Alexander Supertramp. Alex shouldered his haversack -- containing niggling more books and rice -- and his .22-caliber rifle and walked into the forest, to live off the land or die trying. It was April, all the same winter in Alaska.

Coming upon the impassable Toklat River, he gave up the idea of walking the 300 miles from Mountain McKinley to the Bering Sea, Mr. Krakauer writes, and took up residence in a rusting Fairbanks city charabanc that had been fitted out equally a rough shelter. He and so entered on what he called, in a manifesto scrawled on a piece of plywood, ''the climactic battle to impale the imitation being within.''

Somehow McCandless grubbed a living from the snows -- gathering last year'south rose hips and wizened berries, shooting squirrels, ptarmigans, porcupines and finally, in June, with his puny footling .22, a moose. He tried to smoke the meat, only his moose quickly spoiled.

By belatedly summer, McCandless'southward incompetence and overconfidence had caught upwards with him. The hunters who found his rotting corpse in September likewise establish this note:

''South O South. I need your help. I am injured, near expiry and too weak to hike out of here. I am all alone, this is no joke. In the proper noun of God, please remain to save me. I am out collecting berries close by and shall render this evening. Thanks, Chris McCandless. August?''

Dying at the age of 24, he had resumed his real proper name.

What was with this guy? Why should nosotros care if he had no better sense than this? (The reactions of most Alaskans who read about his decease ranged from annoyance to indignation.) And what ''false being''? He kept journals, and in betwixt silences would jabber out his ''philosophy'' for hours, but the Supertramp's ideas are never lucid enough to requite us a clue.

And yet, as Mr. Krakauer picks through the adventures and sorrows of Chris McCandless's brief life, the story becomes painfully moving. Mr. Krakauer's elegantly constructed narrative takes us from the ghoulish moment of the hunters' discovery back through McCandless's childhood, the gregarious effusions and icy withdrawals that characterized his coming of age, and, in meticulous detail, the two years of restless roaming that led him to Alaska. The more we learn about him, the more mysterious McCandless becomes, and the more intriguing.

Wherever he went, McCandless sought out the detritus of the lodge of privilege whose child he was -- the son of accomplished, prosperous parents (his father was an outstanding scientist with the National Helmsmanship and Space Administration). McCandless detested the earth of achievement and prosperity. When he graduated from Emory University (with a grade betoken average not far brusque of a perfect iv), he gave his inheritance of more than $24,000 to charity and, without a word to anyone, hit the road. What is fantasy in a Tom Waits vocal was McCandless'southward notion of the good life.

If the world no longer offered the sort of wilderness that freely killed those who braved its dangers, then McCandless would create a wilderness within, discarding the rudimentary protections of modernistic life -- matches, maps, even warm clothing. ''In his own mind, if nowhere else, the terra would thereby remain incognita,'' Mr. Krakauer writes. Hardly eating, never letting his anguished family know where he was, nearly dying of thirst in the Mojave Desert, canoeing a storm-racked Gulf of California, setting fire to the terminal of his money, he vowed, every bit he wrote to an acquaintance, ''to live this life for some time to come. The freedom and simple beauty of information technology is just too good to pass up.''

Mr. Krakauer, a contributing editor at Exterior magazine, tracks down almost everyone who knew McCandless in his 2 years of wandering. As their memories reconstruct Alexander Supertramp, an image of the young anchorite begins to emerge, and so vivid at times that it dazzles, at others so mystifying that i wants to scream. The people who run across him love him, while the reader longs to kick him in the pants. An 81-year-old man whom Mr. Krakauer calls Ronald A. Franz loved McCandless then much he begged to adopt him as a grandson.

''We'll talk about it when I go back from Alaska, Ron,'' McCandless replied. The author adds: ''He had again evaded the impending threat of human intimacy.''

After he had slipped away, McCandless wrote Franz an insolent alphabetic character admonishing him to alive as he, the Supertramp, saw fit: ''If you desire to get more than out of life, Ron, yous must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that volition at first appear to y'all to be crazy.''

''Astoundingly,'' Mr. Krakauer writes, ''the 81-year-old human being took the advised 24-year-old vagabond'due south communication to heart. Franz placed his article of furniture and virtually of his other possessions in a storage locker, bought a GMC Duravan and . . . sat out in the desert, 24-hour interval later on day after twenty-four hour period, awaiting his young friend's render.''

McCandless'south passion was all for the struggle inside himself, a one-half-blind inner seeking for he knew not what -- some sort of transcendence through renunciation. The reader never comes to make sense of his spiritual craving, but its very impalpability makes it familiar. Do we non all thirst for something we cannot define? Does McCandless'south fanatical conclusion to find it make him a saint, a holy fool or just plain nuts?

The 1 weakness of Mr. Krakauer's endeavour to understand Chris McCandless lies in an inadequate consideration of psychiatric affliction. Indeed, he says directly out, ''McCandless wasn't mentally ill.'' Just in a long and engaging aside almost his own youthful daring of death, Mr. Krakauer lets u.s. know that he himself has sought out risks that virtually of us would call insane.

Did McCandless want to die in Alaska? That is Mr. Krakauer's ultimate question, and the whole book tin be seen as a quest for a empathetic answer. Mr. Krakauer's antihero conforms to no familiar type. His contradictions, in retrospect, exercise not illumine but rather obscure his grapheme. In death, he passes beyond the reach of mortal comprehension.

Christopher McCandless'due south life and his decease may have been meaningless, cool, even reprehensible, only by the terminate of ''Into the Wild,'' yous intendance for him deeply.