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Associated Press
3 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Book Review: Jess Walter's 'So Far Gone' sets a redemption story in fractured, modern America
When the history of the United States in 2025 is written, perhaps one of the best things that will be said is: 'Well, it made for some great art.' Consider 'So Far Gone,' the new novel by Jess Walter. Set in present day America, it opens with two kids wearing backpacks knocking on a cabin door. 'What are you fine young capitalists selling?' asks Rhys Kinnick, before realizing the kids are his grandchildren. They carry with them a note from Kinnick's daughter, describing dad as a 'recluse who cut off contact with our family and now lives in squalor in a cabin north of Spokane.' It's a great hook that draws you in and doesn't really let up for the next 256 pages. We learn why Kinnick pulled a Thoreau and went to the woods seven years ago (Hint: It has a lot to do with the intolerance exhibited by no small percentage of Americans and embodied by a certain occupant of the White House), as well as the whereabouts of Kinnick's daughter, Bethany, and why her messy marriage to a guy named Shane led to Kinnick's grandchildren being dropped off at his cabin. In a neat narrative gimmick, the chapters are entitled 'What Happened to ___' and fill in the main strokes of each character's backstory, as well as what happens to them in the present timeline. Told with an omniscient third-person sense of humor, the book's themes are nonetheless serious. On the demise of journalism in the chapter 'What Happened to Lucy,' one of Kinnick's old flames and colleagues at the Spokesman-Review: She 'hated that reporters were expected to constantly post on social media… before knowing what their stories even meant.' Or Kinnick's thoughts as he holds a .22 Glock given to him just in case by a retired police officer who is helping him get his grandkids back from the local militia: 'The shiver that went through his arm! The power!… The weight of this gun was the exact weight of his anger and his fear and his sense of displacement… That's where its incredible balance lay.' As Kinnick links up with various characters and drives across the Northwest in search of his daughter and grandchildren, the plot unfolds quickly. Most readers won't need more than a day or two to reach the final page, which satisfies the Thoreau quote Walter uses in the story's preface: 'Not till we are lost… 'till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves.' ___ AP book reviews:
New York Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Witty Caper Starring Gun-Toting Christians in Rural Washington
SO FAR GONE, by Jess Walter Northeastern Washington, jimmied into borders with Canada and Idaho, is a kind of paradox. Beyond the city of Spokane, alfalfa and wheat fields fan out, bucolic, framed by mountain ranges, foothills fringed with spruces and Ponderosa pines. It's the setting for the fictional town of Twin Peaks and the boyhood landscape of the real-life serial killer Israel Keyes, whose parents raised him off the grid, downwind from a smelter that polluted the Columbia River watershed. Amid dense woods and remote valleys, menace prowls. Against this backdrop Jess Walter's buoyant, witty caper 'So Far Gone' plays with the region's Gothic elements, tweaking our expectations while serving up a comic brew of precocious children, hapless adults, end-times preachers and armed militias. For seven years, 60-something Rhys Kinnick has isolated himself in a cabin reachable only by dirt road, without a cellphone or running water, a Thoreau of the 21st century. A retired environmental journalist, he's toiling over a philosophical treatise called 'The Atlas of Wisdom,' which he doubts will ever see any eyes but his own. In the spring of 2024, his grandchildren show up at his door. Leah's 13, the reincarnation of Rhys's daughter, Bethany, the 'same insistent, dark, almond-shaped eyes. Same long brown hair. Same direct way of speaking.' Asher, age 9, is a chess neophyte and chatterbox. Bethany has vanished and they need his help. Walter roves between characters with a Russo-esque realism and omniscience. When Leah was an infant, Bethany's relationship with the girl's father, a flaky, drug-addled bassist named Doug, derailed; she then met her husband, Shane, in Narcotics Anonymous, where they both found God as a path out of addiction. Except that Shane's increasingly high on radicalized Christianity, advocating for tradwives and home-schooling, drawn to the anti-government Army of the Lord (or 'AOL'). Now Bethany's AWOL, and Shane wants the kids back by any means necessary. It's not long before AOL thugs abduct Leah and Asher, breaking Rhys's cheekbone. To find them he enlists the aid of his ex-girlfriend Lucy Park, a newsroom editor who is feisty and fast on her feet. Rhys may still be in love: 'In his defense! She did! Look amazing! Slender and fit, formerly short black hair grown out past her shoulders, pulled away from her apple-shaped face, and those runner's legs,' he thinks. 'The old desire heating up the furnace.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
