Arts Alive San Antonio

So Far Gone by Jess Walter

Reviewed by Steven G. Kellman

            When nine-year-old Asher and thirteen-year-old Leah show up on his doorstep, Rhys Kinnick is speechless. He is at a loss for words not merely because it has been so long since he last saw his grandchildren that their appearance shocks him into silence. Kinnick has been a recluse living off the grid for seven years, and he has lost the habit of speaking to anyone but himself.

An environmental journalist who lost his job to industry downsizing, cantankerous Kinnick lost his temper when his son-in-law, Shane, began spouting Christian Nationalist provocations, including the canard that a cabal of rich Jews was destroying the National Football League. After slugging his daughter’s husband, Kinnick, long divorced,  retreated to a cabin in the woods north of Spokane. Like his hero Henry David Thoreau, he has been leading a solitary, misanthropic existence, without Internet, television, or flush toilet. Yet, at the beginning of Jess Walter’s eighth novel, Kinnick, in his sixties, is not so far gone that he cannot, with some difficulty, be brought back into the human family.

So Far Gone is a quest narrative, initially propelled by the search for Kinnick’s daughter, Bethany. It is her two children who show up at Kinnick’s place needing adult supervision. While their father, Shane, is off in Idaho worshipping at the Church of the Blessed Fire, Bethany has chosen to disappear for a few days. However, before Kinnick can, reluctantly, take charge of his grandchildren, he is attacked by thugs belonging to the self-proclaimed Army of the Lord who spirit Asher and Leah away to their father in Idaho. Although only thirteen, Leah has been designated to be the child bride of the nineteen-year-old son of Pastor Gallen of the Church of the Blessed Fire. Further complications ensue when Leah, too, disappears and has to be tracked down.

The novel proceeds through a series of madcap adventures that take Kinnick to the Idaho redoubt of the Army of the Lord called the Rampart; to a druggy music festival in Canada; and through the roads of rural Washington. Walter filters the story through the eyes of several remarkable characters, especially Kinnick, who has spent seven years thinking about fundamental things and now trains his mind on the practical demands of a brutal predicament. Bethany, who both loves and resents her father, is uncomfortable with the religious fanaticism that has enthralled her husband. Leah is feeling the stirrings of adolescence, and Asher is a bottomless fountain of questions. Dean Burris, the church’s enforcer, is a vicious sociopath, and Chuck Littlefield, a batty retired detective, is intent on doing dangerous battle on behalf of Rhys Kinnick.

The novel wraps several serious contemporary issues – environmental degradation; conversion therapy; religious extremism; homophobia; Native American rights; parental authority – into a boisterous, giddy plot. Once aboard, the reader is bound to stay along for the ride. Although he is a troubled soul, Kinnick is also a loveable curmudgeon who has been hurt into a jaundiced view of the contemporary world. In 2016, he is convinced, “the greedy assholes joined with the idiot assholes and the paranoid assholes in what turned out to be an unbeatable constituency. . . . Whatever the number, it was more than he could bear. Especially when they were in his own family.”

His solution was withdrawal. However, the sentimental arc of the novel is toward reintegration and an affirmation of family ties that, when it comes, after much agony, feels somewhat sappy and contrived. Much more compelling is the Kinnick who can acknowledge the “long sad cultural slide that he’d had the misfortune of witnessing firsthand (celebrity entertainment bleeding into government, cable TV eroding newspapers, information collapsing into a huge Internet-size black hole of bad ideas, boldfaced lies and bullshit, until the literal worst person in America got elected president).” With Rhys Kinnick, who spent twelve years writing a book about environmental degradation called From River to Rimrock that sold a few hundred copies and did nothing to avert the ruin of the Pacific Northwest, Walter has created a barometer of the current zeitgeist. Balmy days are gone, and the weather man has gone barmy.
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So Far Gone, by Jess Walter; Harper; 2025; $30.00. Book Review