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.'
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