At the core of Jess Walter’s thrilling new novel So Far Gone is a thought experiment we should all conduct for ourselves these days: What would cause us to break? That is, what level of outrage, what pressures or stresses, what new absurdity would be the straw that breaks the camel’s back?
For Rhys Kinnick, it’s a 2016 Thanksgiving dinner with his conspiracy-spewing son-in-law, Shane. Having spent his life as an environmental reporter, facts matter deeply to Rhys. So by the time this guy comes at him with preposterous theories about the NFL controlling the media, he’s had it. He hauls off and cold cocks the guy – deeply satisfying for the reader, but really upsetting for his daughter. He had promised to be nice, after all. Rather than dealing with the fallout, he absconds to a cabin in the woods and spends the next seven years living off the grid like Thoreau.
Honestly, who among us – when faced with a particularly infuriating headline – hasn’t thrown up their hands and said, “That’s it, I’m out.” Sure, it’s easy to condemn Rhys for cowardice, and as we should know, despair in the face of (gestures at the world) is not a viable strategy. But even if we won’t admit it consciously, what Rhys did is relatable, and a lot of us probably fantasize about making similarly drastic retreats..
“At the time, it didn’t feel like I was dropping out,” Rhys tells his granddaughter Leah, seven years later. “It felt more like I was…stepping aside. I felt like the world was drifting in one direction and I was going the other way.”
That’s the setup for the novel, which actually begins in 2023, amidst an even more fraught political climate. So it’s not good timing for Rhys to reenter impolite society. But he doesn’t have a choice. His two grandkids are dropped off at his door. Apparently, their mother has had it with the world (and her increasingly unstable husband – he of the receiving end of Rhys’s fist), and has run away. But the kids, 13-year-old Leah and 9-year-old Asher, are in Rhys’s care for less than six hours before a couple of Shane’s associates, members of a right-wing sect called the Army of the Lord, tracks down the kids, delivers Rhys a thorough beating, and takes them off to their compound in northern Idaho called the Rampart.
Alongside an ex-cop named Chuck, Rhys, who’s out of his element and deeply in over his head, begins a quest to rescue the kids. And the plot hums from along from there, a high-stakes gambol through the opioid-soaked and Christian fundamentalist territory of Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho.
The second big question Walter asks his reader to consider in this novel: Is the American way of life, our culture, and our society truly so far gone it can’t be saved? Or is the title referring to Rhys? To the noodle-brained man-children conspiracy theorists training for the second coming at their compound? All of the above?
If you’ve read any of Walter’s novels before, you’ll definitely recognize him here, and that’s a very good thing. Walter is a writer with all kinds of range – he started his career writing crime novels like Citizen Vince (in fact, Citizen Vince feels like a companion of sorts to So Far Gone). He’s also penned a dude-lit masterpiece titled The Financial Lives of the Poets. He’s perhaps best known for his award-winning and best-selling literary novel, Beautiful Ruins, and most recently, Walter published a politically-tinged historical fiction about the dawn of the labor movement titled The Cold Millions.
So Far Gone feels like a greatest hits album, incorporating career-spanning elements of all of Walter’s best fiction: Punchy, hilarious dialogue, long passages of touching interiority, and astute commentary on the absurdity of our current political moment.
This is a novel that shines a stark and steely light on the cracks in our politics, families, and even ourselves. It attempts to answer what could heal those fissures or what would cause them to break irreparably. But in the end, So Far Gone works so well because it’s so much fun. It’s easy to tell how much fun Walter had writing this novel, and that certainly translates to the reading experience as well.
FICTION
So Far Gone
By Jess Walter
Harper
Published June 10, 2025
