In Jess Walter's latest novel, an uneasy sense of doom
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Kinnick's attempt to suck the marrow out of life is interrupted when his grandkids, 13-year-old Leah and 9-year-old Asher, are delivered to his doorstep after their mother, Kinnick's daughter Bethany, disappears. Kinnick initially doesn't recognize his progeny, whom he hasn't seen since a socially distanced visit early in the pandemic, and their awkward reunion is cut short when the kids are snatched by the Army of the Lord
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Kinnick's quest to rescue his grandkids and find his daughter is aided by his Indigenous friend Brian, a member of the Spokane and Colville tribes; his former girlfriend Lucy, a foul-mouthed, 106-pound, Asian American newspaper editor; and 'Crazy Ass Chuck Littlefield,' an ex-cop turned private investigator who dated Lucy after Kinnick. The action moves from the Washington woods to a militia training facility called the Rampart to an Incan-inspired music festival in Canada. Walter includes edifying asides about climate change, property crime, and the abuses inflicted on Indigenous people, but his comedic touch, which lent levity to his earlier work, is off here.
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The novel has genuinely severe consequences for some characters, but it also makes a lot of excuses for people, presenting some militia members as just misunderstood or misguided, and Kinnick concludes a profanity-laden screed about the 2016 election by saying that Trump voters 'weren't really the problem' because 'maybe they were just burned-out and believed that corruption had rotted everything, that one party was as bad as the next; or maybe they really did long for some nonexistent past.' This would be a pleasant read in a vacuum, but in the world that it's attempting to comment on, it can feel obtuse. I had the urge to scream when Kinnick rhetorically asked 'Was this just how people behaved now? Is this what the world had come to?' Yes, it is. We need to accept how far gone we are or this will be the way our world ends.
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SO FAR GONE
By Jess Walter
Harper, 272 pages, $30
Cory Oldweiler is a freelance writer.
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