Years ago, very early in my bookselling career, I was working a quiet weeknight closing shift at a bookstore in the Pacific Northwest when I became intrigued by the cover of a novel by a regional writer, recently in paperback. The book was nicely packaged (it came in multiple colors!) and had a snappy title, and on a quiet weeknight closing shift in my early twenties, that was enough. I perused the first page and was quickly sucked into an entertaining and yet deeply poignant caper, in which a down-on-his-luck suburban dad makes a late night run to buy overpriced milk at a convenience store (his one job, which he forgot, of course), and winds up entangled with a couple of local hooligans looking for a front for their grow operation. I was hooked.
That book was The Financial Lives of the Poets, and the author was Jess Walter. Walter was well-loved in my corner of the world (he’s from Spokane, Washington), and I was blown away by how well he captured, on the minute, day-to-day level, how desperate and yet sort of funny it felt to live and work and fret and wonder in the years immediately after the 2008 economic crash. Walter would break out, once and for all, of the “regional writer” box with his next novel, Beautiful Ruins, an ambitious, dazzling historical epic starring midcentury Hollywood royalty and set in the Cinque Terre. Beautiful Ruins still gets talked about in hushed, reverent tones in some circles, and there’s a reason for that. But as much as I love a sweeping narrative, I have always held a fondness for the Jess Walter who illustrates so perfectly what it’s like to live in convoluted, contradictory, and sometimes absurd contemporary America.
Earlier this year, it was that Jess Walter who came barreling back with So Far Gone, a slim, propulsive, wryly funny novel that, without lapsing into didactic hand-wringing or reductive cliche, manages to take a spectacular core sample of our present moment. It was one of my favorite novels of the year.
So Far Gone introduces us to Rhys Kinnick, former journalist and current hermit. On Thanksgiving Day, 2016, Rhys, already cranky, reached his breaking point, lashing out at his son-in-law’s embrace of conspiracy theories. Words were exchanged, a punch was thrown, and before the day was out, he was en route to his grandfather’s old homestead in eastern Washington State, ceremoniously hurling his cell phone out the window on the way. He’s been off grid ever since.
A lot has happened since, in his family and in the world, and Rhys wants no part in any of it. Neither has any place for him, a man of reason and sanity, a believer in truth. He’s better off out in the woods, theoretically writing a book.
But when his grandchildren show up at his front door, with an urgent message from their mother—his only child—Rhys Kinnick is thrust back into the society he tried to leave behind. His daughter is missing. Before long, his grandchildren are, too. They’re in the clutches of an increasingly extreme religious group with a militia wing, to which Rhys’s son-in-law belongs. If Rhys wants them back, he’s going to have to go get them, and if he wants to do that, he’s going to need help: from his best friend (not currently speaking to him), his ex-girlfriend (still mad at him), and a few others. He’ll need to face his own failures as a father and husband, modern technology, a music festival full of hippies, some very scary militia members, and the slim glimmer of possibility that there might be a little good buried under the surface of our fractious, polarized present. All that, and a lot of raccoons.
If this sounds like a funny book, that’s because it is. But it’s also a serious one, about the dangers of extremism and uncompromising worldviews, about family and community, and, ultimately, about showing up to fight for what you believe in and what you love. There are moments of intense action and peril here, but also a conclusion that left me deeply satisfied, and openly, unguardedly hopeful.
Like Rhys Kinnick, I have a reputation as a bit of a curmudgeon, and like Rhys, I’ve been known to entertain fantasies of running away to a cabin in the woods somewhere. But So Far Gone reminded me that problems were never solved by running away from them, and that in a time and place where division and isolation are the norm, perhaps more isolation is not the answer.
It also made me laugh out loud, and if there’s anything we need more of, it’s probably that.
Sam and Emma Kaas own and run the Norwich Bookstore.
Want to check out all the previous Enthusiasms? You’ll find them here.