After 30 years of publication, Jess Walter is back on the stage with a new book. This time, it might hit too close to home

Like many of Jess Walter’s novels, there’s usually a connection to that one newsroom on Riverside and Monroe where he spent his formative years chasing crime stories.

“My journalist skills will return to me,” Walter said Tuesday. “I will want to write so badly about what we are living in.”

Facing a sold-out crowd at the Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center in North Spokane for the Northwest Passages event, Walter joyfully recalled his past years as a novelist while he discussed his new book, “So Far Gone,” which follows a former environmental journalist at The Spokesman-Review who has been living in the woods in isolation for years without contacting his family. He punched his son-in-law in the face, threw his phone out the window and never looked back.

He resents his son-in-law, who is a rampant conspiracy theorist. And his grandchildren have become old enough that he doesn’t recognize them – until one day, when the kids show up at his door to tell him their dad joined a religious cult and their mother is nowhere to be found.

Walter bridges the divide – and the relationships – between politics, religion and fringe groups, a similar story to one he’s faced before.

In the 1990s, Walter was thrust into the spotlight at The S-R for his coverage surrounding Randy Weaver, an anti-government religious radical who engaged in a standoff with law enforcement at his remote cabin in North Idaho. And while the national media fell silent covering Ruby Ridge, Walter kept pushing.

His new book also takes place in the wilderness, the same one where Walter grew up as a child. It’s similar to the type of terrain where Weaver’s wife and child were eventually shot by an FBI sniper all those years ago – a wilderness that welcomes seclusion and hides the most radical and extreme beliefs in the trees.

But now, with America significantly more fraught with political differences, Walter finds a way to show how those differences can turn into fringe beliefs that drive one to extreme isolation.

“With the political and social division we have in the culture right now … I have to remind myself a novel is a terrible way to break news,” Walter told the crowd. “I am writing this in ’23 and ’24, and I thought, ‘I don’t think we are done with this era yet.’ ”

Tuesday marks 30 years of publishing for Walter. With it came a slew of authors, like Anthony Doerr, Maria Semple, Kristin Hannah, Julia Sweeney, Timothy Egan and more, to tell Walter how amazing, talented and authentic he is in his writing.

“This is your best book,” Sweeney said during a video. “So cathartic in the political place we are at.”

Doerr, a Pulitzer winner, told Walter, “Your books fill our world with heart.”

And Egan said, “I love you from the bottom of my heart … I love everything you’ve written. Your characters are humane, are authentic, they are real.”

Even actor Erik Estrada, who starred in the famous 1970s show “CHiPs” submitted a video on behalf of former reporter Jim Defede to ask Walter a few questions.

Walter didn’t want to pigeonhole himself as a crime fiction writer. After all, he spent his years at The Spokesman-Review as a crime reporter. Through some crime-related books, one about Spokane’s labor unions, another about the 2008 recession or an Italian love story, it’s not morality that Walter looks to for guidance. It’s ethics.

“One person’s morality is another person’s jail, a lack of freedom. It can be a dangerous thing to write toward,” Walter told the crowd.

It’s why in “So Far Gone,” the main character, Rhys Kinnick, starts the story completely irate at the far right. Punching his son-in-law in the face and escaping into isolationism is something people would expect from the radical far right, Walter said.

“He has become a mirror image of the thing driving him away,” he said, a theme that replays itself throughout the novel. “You realize, his son-in-law is motivated by the same thing he is.”

The sentiment is all too true for the current state of the world, Walter believes. Too often, people label one another as red, as blue, as far right or left. They are identified by those labels, Walter added, which forces people further into seeking out disinformation to confirm their biases. And there’s nothing more people want nowadays, he said, than to escape the dread of horrible news.

The book ended up coming full circle for Walter, who began writing it as the world started to reintegrate again from the COVID-19 pandemic and now is publishing it during the first few months of Donald Trump’s second presidency, one that has already spurred mass protests over deportations.

“I thought (the plot of the book) would be something we would remember,” Walter said. “Not something we would still be living.”