Jess Walter’s sublime ‘So Far Gone’ finds redemption in exasperated Pacific Northwest exile

Jess Walter’s searing and sublime eighth novel, “So Far Gone,” is a wistful elegy — some might say a eulogy — to a kinder, gentler time. Its compelling antihero, sixty-something Rhys Kinnick, has spent seven years in self-imposed exile, occupying a cinder block cabin in a remote region of Washington state. His attempts to improve the home his grandfather once envisioned as a thriving sheep farm have stalled, but he has managed to read more than 900 books during his stay, and to write 2,000-plus pages of a still-unfinished metaphysical volume ambitiously titled “The Atlas of Wisdom.” He reassures himself that in becoming a hermit — leaving behind his daughter, Bethany, and grandchildren, Leah and Asher — and eschewing most creature comforts, he’s modeling Thoreau’s “Walden.”

In the rare encounters he has with other humans, he enjoys quoting favorite passages from it, such as: “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.” And he’s let alone quite a few.

(Harper)

His “step aside” was in part sparked by a 2016 Thanksgiving altercation with his daughter’s dangerously sanctimonious husband, Shane. He’s a born-again Christian whose adherence to increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories have him believing that even the NFL has been infiltrated by “globalists.” Rhys has been subjected to Shane’s rants for years, and distills his son-in-law’s worldview down to this: “a Satanic liberal orthodoxy whose end goal was to subsume good Christians like Shane into an immoral, one-world socialist nightmare in which people pooped in the wrong bathroom.”

Rhys tries valiantly not to engage with Shane during this holiday gathering, but for years he’s hopelessly observed the “long sad cultural decline” that led to “the literal worst person in America” getting elected president, and he can’t take it anymore. What’s more, he’s been laid off from his job as an environmental reporter for a newspaper, and his girlfriend has told him she doesn’t ever want to see him again. When he mutters aloud what he is thinking about Shane — “Daughter married an idiot” — all hell breaks loose, prompting Rhys to flee without explanation or apology. At first he has no idea where he’s going, but, impulsively pitching his cell phone out the window, he steers his car toward the cabin, where he’ll take permanent refuge.

Among the many melancholy pleasures of this novel is that Walter synthesizes that desire many of us feel — and mostly resist — to crawl under the covers and not reemerge for a few decades, to nurse a “bone-deep sorrow.” Rhys luxuriates in his solitude and lack of responsibility, detaching to such a degree that, in 2020, he’s largely unaware of the COVID-19 pandemic until his barber insists he don a mask. He’s startled out of his oblivion a few years later by a knock at the front door.

On his porch stand a boy and a girl he at first mistakes for strangers. “What are you fine capitalists selling?” he asks them. “Magazines or chocolate bars?”

“We aren’t selling anything,” replies the boy. “We’re your grandchildren.”

It’s then that Rhys comprehends that in protecting himself he has failed to be there for his beloved ex-wife, Celia, who’s since died of lymphoma, or for his daughter, who has mysteriously run away, leaving a note to a neighbor instructing her to take her kids to stay with her estranged father. “He is a recluse who cut off contact with our family and now lives in squalor,” she writes. Reading her words, remorse hits like a ton of bricks. He asks himself: What have I done? Having spent the last seven years in a state of self-absorption — or, as his ex-girlfriend Lucy later puts it: “You’ve just been up there pouting?” — his new quest is simply to atone.

Throughout the novel, Rhys references Kant, De Beauvoir, Sartre, Virginia Woolf and Epictetus, among others, using knowledge as a balm and escape hatch. He mourns the collapse of culture “into a huge internet-size black hole of bad ideas, bald-faced lies, and bullshit.” But into that cauldron he must once again dive, as his daughter’s whereabouts remain unknown, his 13-year-old granddaughter has been promised by her stepfather to the 19-year-old son of a radical church pastor, and his grandson is late for a chess match in Spokane. He starts up his 1978 Audi 100 — “half car, half garbage. Carbage” — and the three take off.

Rhys awkwardly rebuilds bridges with friends and family in a series of adventures and misadventures, and slowly registers what he’s missed during his absence. “Those changes had a strange quality to them,” he observes. “Not only did they seem broadly unimpressive, but in some cases, they seemed like steps backwards.” For example, “not only were there no flying cars, there seemed to be more big pickups and SUVs than ever.”

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. He’s also invested his protagonist with a self-deprecating sense of humor that keeps his pessimism from veering into maudlin territory. If there’s hope to be found within this harsh landscape, it’s in our connection with one another — an antidote to despair. We all have to live through a dark season now and then, Rhys comforts himself. Or, to paraphrase a Virginia Woolf line from “To the Lighthouse” that Rhys invoked earlier: What gets us through are “little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.” Or for that matter, novels like this one.

Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist. She was director of Oprah’s Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.