‘I sure hope this book isn’t as relevant as I fear’: Jess Walter gives insider look into the newsroom world, Christian nationalist movement, family and forgiveness in ‘So Far Gone’
In the opening chapter of “So Far Gone,” Rhys Kinnick, a former Spokesman-Review environmental journalist, throws his phone out the car window after a fight with his son-in-law, marking the beginning of several years of isolation.
“It was possible to disappear from others’ lives, of course – from Lucy’s, from Bethany’s – but he suspected that when he woke up tomorrow, wherever he was, the person he really wanted to never see again would be staring right back in the mirror,” Walter wrote. “Maybe don’t get a mirror, he thought, and this made him smile.”
Kinnick is the central character in Jess Walter’s latest novel, which will be released by Harper Collins on Tuesday. That same night, Walter will join Northwest Passages at the Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center to discuss this comedic thriller that explores isolation, family and forgiveness.
“The scene where he throws it out the window and it bounces and he watches it briefly in the side mirror, and then he immediately drives to a bar, is such wish fulfillment for me,” Walter said, laughing. “And the land that I end up sending him to is the land my brother and sister owns, that my parents lived on, that we lived on when we were kids. And so it was very much in the beginning, a kind of thought experiment. … That’s one of the things I love about writing fiction, is taking something that pops into my head but would never do, and then taking it to its most ridiculous and plot-driven extreme.”
The book’s true starting point is when Kinnick’s isolation is broken; his grandchildren show up at his front door after their missing mother left a note in her daughter’s boot, but Kinnick doesn’t recognize them. On this point, Walter struggled the most connecting to Kinnick.
“I don’t go a couple days without talking to each of my kids, and I end every conversation with ‘I love you,’ ” Walter said. “It was so hard for me to imagine being that father, I just never would.”
The novel is near present; Walter finished writing in 2024. As noted in the book review, the book detailed Rampart, the white Christian nationalist compound in Idaho. Also featured was Dean Burris, the Dominion Eagle Killer, who was sent to jail for killing eagles.
“I just kept thinking, ‘I sure hope this book isn’t as relevant as I fear,’” Walter said.
The book deals with fringe political beliefs and how espousing those beliefs drives people into both figurative and literal isolation.
“What starts as political almost always becomes personal,” Walter said. “Originally, I imagined him with a much more drastic version of a rant that I’ve said in my head, you know, and giving voice to that rant, and then imagining why he would go off the grid, what kind of reporter that he was, I’ve seen it described as peeling back the layers of an onion, but it’s almost the inverse of that, because by the end, you have this much larger, hopefully fully realized character.”
Though Kinnick is the central character, Walter allows us to look over the shoulder of several other characters. He said his favorite was the grandson, Asher, who is a chess prodigy, but only in his own mind.
“One of my favorite kind of characters to write is a wannabe prodigy,” Walter said. “That’s probably the most autobiographical I’ll ever get on page, so that was great fun.”
The book features another character employed by The Spokesman-Review, Lucy Park, and an old flame who climbed the ranks in Kinnick’s absence, who begrudgingly babysits young reporters while worrying about her troubled son.
“Lucy could remember when a fight at a school board meeting would be unimaginable (Fight over what? Lunch lady uniforms? Custodian pay?) but now, with everyone on edge, still pissed off by school closures during the pandemic, angry about the teaching of sex ed or evolution or drag queens or gay rights, or about some book no one had checked out from the school library in a decade, Random Yelling was practically an agenda item,” Walter wrote.
Unsurprisingly, given Walter’s background, the book knows journalism, down to the fact that reporters rarely write the headlines for their stories, including this one. Your move, copy desk.
“There’s a great tradition of newspaper reporters that became novelists,” Walter said. “And one of the things that I’ve always loved about Charles Portis, even in later interviews, after ‘True Grit,’ after ‘The Dog of the South,’ after all of his success, he would call himself an old newspaper man, and I think I’m never quite too far from that.”