Lost with masterful storyteller
Every writer of fiction or nonfiction has a lot of choices to make, but one of the biggest is what order to reveal their information in.
It’s easy to forget that writers, particularly nonfiction writers, know the whole story before they write page one and there is, I can tell you from experience, a great urge to hook the reader right away with your best, most compelling and, if the subject matter warrants it, most poignant stuff. Or failing that, at least the bits you worked hardest to get.
But Harley Rustad did not do this. Rustad made a bet that his readers would stick around if he left out the one thing that would make me, at least, feel for the man who disappeared in India in 2016 until almost two-thirds of the way through the book. He also bet he could start slow with a basically unsympathetic main character and carefully build sympathy alongside the ultimately tragic arc of his life.
Those are dangerous bets to make, but it turns out it was absolutely the right call. Because Rustad proves himself here to be a masterful storyteller, unfolding character, plot, suspense, pathos, bathos and half a dozen other Greek nouns so meticulously that you’re not going to want to put this book down.
“Lost in the Valley of Death” is the story of Justin Alexander Shetler, who was born in 1981. It made him the perfect age to grow up to be the sort of annoying social media character who leaves his profitable life in the big city behind to find himself — and as many followers as he can pick up along the way — to travel. It’s the type of nomadic life that only extreme and inevitably unacknowledged privilege can allow.
Shetler always wanted to be someplace and someone he wasn’t. Seeing “The Last of the Mohicans” at an impressionable age led to the very white Shetler wanting to see the world through Indigenous eyes. When that didn’t work, he began trekking around the world, taking pride in the extremity of his efforts and self-deprivations, at one point praising the absence of Wi-Fi in one of his remote locations … in an Instagram post to his more than 10,000 followers.
Shetler’s search for meaning mixed with a need for attention and affection led him to ever more extreme adventures, culminating in the Himalayas, from which he never returned.
Once you put the book down and catch your breath, you’ll be left with questions Rustad wisely does not ask outright. Like what is it about First World life that leads so many to seek meaning in the developing world? And what is it about white people that makes us so frickin’ unhinged?
Partial answers are implied in the book, just as partial resolutions to the mystery of Shetler’s disappearance are. But like any good book, and this is a very good book, it provides no real answers, no closure, no meaning. It’s just life, as seen through the lens of one of its sadder stories.