So Far Gone

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins—and in the propulsive spirit of Charles Portis’ True Grit—comes a hilarious, empathetic, and brilliantly provocative adventure through life in modern America, about a reclusive journalist forced back into the world to rescue his kidnapped grandchildren.

SAM'S REVIEW

In amongst romances set on the Italian coast (Beautiful Ruins) and historical fiction about the 1900 Spokane Free Speech riots (The Cold Millions), Jess Walter is a timely chronicler of American lives. His 2009 novel The Financial Lives of the Poets portrayed the impact of the financial crisis on America's middle-classes to darkly comedic effect. His latest, So Far Gone, addresses today's normalisation of political and societal extremes with similarly pointed humour, and more than a little tragedy.

Rhys Kinnick is a grandfather who has gone off the grid. After years working as a local journalist, he increasingly found himself at odds with the world he reported on, feeling "like my whole species had gone extinct". Following a fight with Shane, his conspiracy-theorist son-in-law, he stormed out and headed for a racoon-infested cabin in the woods, throwing his phone out of his car window on the way there. In the seven years since, his withdrawal from the outside world has had the unintended consequence of losing touch with his daughter and grandchildren. 

That isolation comes to a sudden, crushing halt when his grandchildren, half-siblings Leah (age 13) and Asher (age 9), turn up at the cabin to tell him their mother, Bethany, has disappeared and Asher's dad, Shane, has joined a heavily armed Christian fundamentalist group, Army of The Lord. Rhys turns to his former best friend Brian for help tracking down Bethany, although he has a few bridges to mend, having previously declared his love to Joanie, Brian’s partner. A plan to find Bethany is formulated but almost instantly detonated when two of Shane's friends find Kinnick and the children breaking Kinnick's cheekbone and kidnapping the children.

Desperate, Rhys asks his acerbic ex-girlfriend, newspaper editor Lucy Park, for help. After bringing him up to speed on the state of the world - "We've got antivaxxers and tax protestors, flat-Earth school board members and at least one posse comitatus county commissioner" - Lucy puts him in touch with her other ex-boyfriend, a retired police officer turned overzealous, gun-happy, private investigator, Chuck Littlefield. And from there things go really pear-shaped.

While So Far Gone is at one level a crime story - a hunt for kidnapped grandchildren and a disappeared daughter - the plot is a means to an end: a propulsive set-up for a wryly humorous plea for America’s soul. Through Rhys, Walter questions how America has come to this point: a politically divided nation, in which the unthinkable - racism, political violence, religious fundamentalism -  is now acceptable. With his former journalist hat on, Walter asks: "[w]here was the story about how fear had infected so many people... How these insane things kept happening, these eruptions of senseless violence, of anger and ignorance and greed and mendacity, like ancient fissure bubbling up under the surface". 

Although I don't know Walter's political beliefs, the ire of So Far Gone is firmly pointed at the right and its adoption of the conspiracists, religious radicals and racists. That said, Walter is too skilled and empathetic a writer, and perhaps too patriotic an American, not to recognise that the anger causing society's fissures must have an explanation. For instance, while I will never understand the American obsession with firearms, Walter's telling of Rhys holding a gun for the first time displays his perception of the appeal: "[t]he weight of this gun was the exact weight of his anger and his fear and his sense of displacement. That's what the gun weighed. That's where its incredible balance lay." 

While So Far Gone will certainly antagonise some of Donald Trump's supporters, for those watching the MAGA movement with your head in your hands, you'll ‘enjoy’ this satirical, unruly adventure about the unlikeliest of heroes fighting back against its supporters' worst tendencies. 

PUBLISHER REVIEW

"A warm, funny, loving novel. . . . It's an American original."—Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of Tom Lake

"Searing and sublime … Walter is a slyly adept social critic, and has clearly invested his protagonist with all of the outrage and heartbreak he himself feels about the dark course our world has taken ... What gets us all through … are novels like this one.” Leigh Haber, Los Angeles Times.

Rhys Kinnick has gone off the grid. At Thanksgiving a few years back, a fed-up Rhys punched his conspiracy-theorist son-in-law in the mouth, chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, with no one around except a pack of hungry raccoons.

Now Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep. Can this failed husband and father, a man with no internet and a car that barely runs, reemerge into a broken world to track down his missing daughter and save his sweet, precocious grandchildren from the members of a dangerous militia

With the help of his caustic ex-girlfriend, a bipolar retired detective, and his only friend (who happens to be furious with him), Kinnick heads off on a wild journey through cultural lunacy and the rubble of a life he thought he’d left behind. So Far Gone is a rollicking, razor-sharp, and moving road trip through a fractured nation, from a writer who has been called “a genius of the modern American moment” (Philadelphia Inquirer).