In So Far Gone, Jess Walter's first novel since 2020's The Cold Millions, the protagonist is drawn out of several years of self-imposed isolation when his partly estranged grandchildren suddenly appear at the screen door of his cinder block cabin in remote Stevens County.
The opening pages see Rhys Kinnick, a retired journalist, doing some quick mental math to calculate just how long it's been since he willfully removed himself from society — even if the word recluse causes him to bristle.
The publication of So Far Gone — which releases on June 10 — has Walter doing some mental math of his own. Sitting in his home office on the upper level of a now-converted detached garage, he reflects that it's been exactly 30 years since the publication of Every Knee Shall Bow, the book that propelled his own writing career beyond the columns of his hometown paper.
That nonfiction account, which centered on the deadly 11-day standoff between U.S. marshals and the Weaver family near Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, sprang from the coverage that put his reporting team at the Spokesman Review in the running for a Pulitzer Prize.
"The Ruby Ridge book is one of the reasons that I found myself sort of drawn back to the radical right ideas of this book," Walter says.
"I was thinking back to how, if someone would have told me that these fringe characters carrying these [anti-government] signs in 1992 when I covered that story, or in '95 when the book came out, that that would be the mainstream, I would have thought it was insane," he continues.
A telling exchange in So Far Gone, and one of Walter's admitted favorites, is when Kinnick asks a former colleague, "Who covers the radical right these days?" "Uh, the government reporter?" is her response. Kinnick is slowly struck by the gravity of what she's saying: "no longer was the fringe on the fringe."
"We have a different reality when we cross these borders now."
This new book is thus Walter's exploration of the surreal American moment in which we find ourselves, a time when a sitting U.S. president openly floats the idea that his predecessor was replaced midterm by a robot. Meanwhile, his supporters cheer on arbitrary deportations and the dismantling of longstanding federal programs by a ketamine-fueled tech bro and his goon squad.
For Walter to depict that moment through the uncomprehending eyes of an outsider, he has Kinnick clumsily re-enter a world that is now post-COVID and post-truth — "almost," he explains, "like a Rip Van Winkle."
Kinnick's motivation is to rescue his grandchildren from their father, Shane, who's fallen under the powerful sway of conspiracy theories and far-right religious militancy, and reunite them with Bethany, Kinnick's daughter. Bethany might share Shane's desire for a life-ordering meaning and purpose, but she's chosen to search for it down less volatile paths.
The awkward adventure, alternately tense and comedic, brings Kinnick and his companions into Spokane, to rural Idaho, on to British Columbia and back to Kinnick's makeshift hermitage. Walter points to a spot on a nearby bookshelf where three books by Charles Portis — True Grit, The Dog of the South and Norwood — are aligned upright.
"I really wanted to write this sort of road trip book, the kind of hapless quest that Portis writes so well," he says.
Beyond providing a sense of narrative momentum, the characters' movement though different parts of the Inland Northwest gave him an opportunity to trace the country's fissures and fragmentation by means of geography.
"The idea that we cross these borders and the rules change was something that really came about in the writing and studying what's happening in the country," he says.
"It's indicative of these cultural borders that we cross all the time. Those borders are in places that they didn't always used to be. We're getting entirely different sets of information, of what we call news, of what religion means. We have a different reality when we cross these borders now."
It's been quite a few years — 16, in fact — since Walter last confronted the zeitgeist head-on in book-length fiction. Before the early 20th-century historical and sociopolitical drama of The Cold Millions, there was Beautiful Ruins (2012), an ambitious and expansive story that stretched from the Italian coast to Hollywood.
Those more recent novels were connected to Walter's larger body of work by what he calls "a certain wistful humor that undercuts everything I write." But they had "huge casts" and "larger historical frameworks" than a novel like 2009's The Financial Lives of the Poets, which might as well be a prequel to So Far Gone.
"I remember when I was writing Financial Lives of the Poets and the financial crisis had just hit us in this way. I like to think that there are these moments when it feels like the car is going off the road, and my impulse is to stick my head out the window and describe what I see," he says with a wry smile.
"In both cases, that's what I felt like I was doing. Working on this in 2024 as we were lurching toward another election, it became clear that no matter who won, we weren't done with this period of history yet."
It isn't too great a spoiler to say that, in the tale that Walter crafted to capture that period of history, some individuals do seize the opportunities for redemption that are presented to them. As if answering the question implicit in the book's title, they manage to pull themselves back from the precipice that would see them plunging headlong into blind hatred, fear, resentment or disaffection.
But how true to life are those characters' reconciliations and sacrifices? Or are they just wish fulfillment on the part of the fiction writer?
"One of the great things about The Cold Millions, set in 1909 Spokane, was seeing how these [political] cycles come and go and replace themselves. And so I do have hope," Walter says.
"I also think of what Kafka said, though. There is always hope; but not for us." ♦
Launch Party: Jess Walter's So Far Gone • Tue, June 10 at 7 pm • Sold out • Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center • 211 E. Desmet • (Other local events: July 17 at BookPeople Moscow and July 24 at The Well-Read Moose, Coeur d'Alene) • jesswalter.com
