A Worthy Novel About These Times™

When we meet Rhys Kinnick at the beginning of Jess Walter’s new novel, So Far Gone, he’s in the process of erasing himself. After 30 years working as an environmental journalist across the Pacific Northwest, Kinnick (who’s almost always referred to by his last name) was forced into retirement by his ever-shrinking industry in 2015, just as everyone around him seemed to be losing their grasp on reality. In his years as a reporter, Kinnick observed as conspiracy theories went from being the domain of loggers who thought forests were full of fake-tree surveillance devices to representing a dominant current in electoral politics. (As he puts it: “The greedy assholes joined with the idiot assholes and the paranoid assholes in what turned out to be an unbeatable constituency.”) Cast aside by his industry and increasingly feeling like a stranger in his own country, Kinnick shows up to his family’s Thanksgiving dinner in 2016 with a modest goal: to get through the night without exploding at his conspiracy-theorist son-in-law, Shane. Kinnick — who’s divorced and struggling to maintain a relationship with his daughter, Beth, and her two kids — knows he’s at risk of alienating everyone left in his life, and does his best to endure Shane’s word vomit about “real patriots,” Revelations, and “Jew York.” Kinnick winds up punching him, storming out of the house, and going off the grid, throwing his phone out the car window for good measure.

With a dog-eared copy of Walden in tow (Thoreau provides the novel’s epigraph, and is a winking reference throughout), Kinnick retreats to a dumpy ranch he inherited from his grandfather, where self-erasure becomes an obsession. He begins tearing down the property, building by dilapidated building, returning it to its natural state and removing all trace of himself from a “risible” world that left him behind. If So Far Gone’s starting point is an obvious, potentially static thought experiment — what if you could opt out of the past decade or so of American life? — where it goes is much more entertaining and, ultimately, cathartic. When Beth disappears and Kinnick’s estranged grandkids, Leah and Asher, show up on his doorstep with Shane’s Christian militant buddies in pursuit, Kinnick is forced to reenter a changed world after seven and a half years spent in his own head. What follows is a madcap road novel in which Kinnick zigzags across the Pacific Northwest, encountering one distinctly American weirdo after the next as he tries to reunite the family he ran away from.

Since publishing his first novel in 2001, Walter has wandered all over the genre map, from the comedic crime caper Citizen Vince to the surreal post-9/11 thriller The Zero to the more domestic concerns in The Financial Lives of the Poets. With his last two novels, the best-sellers Beautiful Ruins and The Cold Millions, he seesawed from Old Hollywood–adjacent glamour to labor-union struggles in early 20th-century Spokane. The through-line uniting these disparate books is a cynical, absurdist sense of humor lined with a cautious humanism — reading his work, it comes as no surprise that Walter once pretended to write for Esquire when he was 20 years old in order to land an interview with Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

There’s a hint of Vonnegut in the ambition of So Far Gone’s thematic scope — which encompasses everything from climate collapse to Trumpism to gun violence — but Walter manages it all by playing on his home turf. A former journalist and a Spokane native, Walter shares more than a little DNA with Kinnick, and the book is at its most incisive when its unwieldy themes manifest in the hyperlocal: in the way a creek flowing through his ranch has all but dried up in Kinnick’s lifetime, or in how a recovering addict might mistakenly find strength in a gun-toting sect of Christians who hide behind a “rampart” in Idaho. If Walter ever risks a pat observation on any of this, it’s when he drifts away from that specificity to comment on the overwhelming enormity of these issues. When reflecting on the book’s climactic act of violence — and the terrifying normalcy of it in this country — Kinnick has little to offer with his internal monologue but a flaccid “Nothing to see here, just America.”

There are approximately 1 million different ways in which a novel about the past ten years in America could devolve into a parade of familiar miseries, but So Far Gone sidesteps those pitfalls by being consistently funny. The book’s marketing copy dares to invoke the Charles Portis masterpiece True Grit, and that comparison runs deeper than the fact that both books feature a gruff older man on the road with a precocious teenage girl. Walter has said he wrote the novel “feverishly,” and that comes through in the rollicking feel of the prose, which is peppered with Portis-y witticisms. (While quietly nursing his fourth beer, Kinnick observes that he’s a terrible nurse, because “this patient wasn’t likely to make it, either.”) That humor is often inextricable from the character arcs. After taking a Chinatown-esque beating, Kinnick spends most of the book with an injured face, which just about everyone he comes across immediately identifies as a “broken zygomatic arch.” It’s a good bit but also a constant reminder to Kinnick that others know things he doesn’t, that he’s out of his depth. That he may not have accomplished very much at all by going full Walden.

As it barrels toward its conclusion, So Far Gone inevitably becomes about the value of connection, though Walter is careful not to position it as a cure-all. “We all live through a dark season now and then,” Kinnick tells himself, a mantra that offers cold comfort when it’s inevitably followed by the thought, How do we get back from something like this? While the book’s central act of violence might bring some of its characters closer together to heal in its aftermath, it also results in a surge of support for the fringe group that’s responsible for it, with people writing “from all over the country” to express their interest. It’s that dash of cynicism that makes So Far Gone a worthy novel about These Times(™) — even at its most optimistic, it never suggests we’ll all be able to come together and hold hands.