Sarah Schutte has written for National Review an eloquent meditation concerning the novella Hatchet, the first in a survival series by Gary Paulsen that describes a boy who finds himself the sole survivor of a plane crash deep in Canadian timberland. Sarah suggests the book is “hollow,” and she’s right, but Hatchet‘s void might not be the deficiency that some consider it to be.

First, here’s Sarah in her own words:

In literature, there are different categories of conflict: man vs. man, man vs. God, man vs. nature, and man vs. himself. This story doesn’t fall into the first two, and while we could make a case for the third option, we see Brian making his peace with nature more often than fighting it. This is especially clear when, through a curious series of events, he has access to a gun, but the thought of using it — especially after he has hunted for food using implements of his own making — gives him a funny feeling.

Which leaves us with man vs. himself. The story contains flashbacks, revealing that Brian knows his mom is having an affair — “The Secret.” His dad, however, seems to have no idea, and Brian can’t figure out a way to tell him. Brian wrestles with himself over this problem, but, as stated earlier, he doesn’t have much time for reflection. He doesn’t have much guidance, either, except through some helpful words from a former teacher and a few random books he read. He wants to be back in civilization, but the sense that he’s motivated in any way by love for his parents is missing. He may conquer himself in the woods in order to survive, but when it comes to relationships, he flounders.

And here the book ends. He has survived, yes, but at what cost? He has gained skills and experience but emotionally something is missing, making this a compelling but strangely hollow tale.

Hatchet is one of the most masculine books available to elementary- and middle-school-age children. While not as hostile to man as naturalist Jack London’s “How to Build a Fire” or modernist Hemingway’s “Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Paulsen’s world in Hatchet nonetheless harnesses the same hardness to describe protagonist Brian’s surroundings.

As a boy, I thrilled at Hatchet‘s introduction when the brush pilot flying young Brian to his father suddenly succumbs to a heart attack. The onset of flatulence, the anxious rubbing of the left upper arm, and finally, the infarction itself, were morbidly realistic — there, quite suddenly, was a kid just like me left with the yoke to land an aircraft on a prairie of pike-like pines. What boy doesn’t dream of such ridiculous scenarios in his fourth-grade classroom? The pointed end on the American and Christian flags above the chalkboard would similarly inspire imagined knightly contests and defeated terrorist incursions (post 9/11) while mathematical monotone droned past one’s ears.

After the crash landing and nursing himself back to health, Brian sets about the task of becoming a man, and he accomplishes this as men do: quietly, singularly, and by quarantining his fears and grief until such a time as he can safely exorcise them. While God is not a named character, the benevolence of an ordered universe is apparent in the shelter and water nearby. Like Adam, Brian is set apart from the animals — a rational creature who develops the area to better accommodate his needs. There in the post-Eden garden, Brian must scrape from the earth and lakebed the strength his parents’ split would never allow him into civilization.

Hatchet is hollow because it’s a book about manhood and the elusiveness thereof, as well as cognizant of male habits and the check valve that operates behind many a man’s forehead.

One can’t help but think of Eliot’s verse:

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Brian’s development is in its infancy at the story’s close. He shouldn’t be a developed thinker a fifth of the way through the series, but he’s had sufficient distance from his smothering mom and shell-shocked dad to become something apart from them. Surrounded by hollow men, Brian subjects nature and himself and becomes more than.

Granted, it’s an ugly, fumbling attempt at times — but he’s only got a hatchet, after all.