Book review: Jess Walter’s ‘So Far Gone’ is so far, soooo good

Art imitates life with deadly accuracy in Jess Walter’s “So Far Gone.”

To say this novel was ripped from the headlines of The Spokesman-Review is not to point to last year, or the year before, but simply last week.

Just consider the story about the white Christian nationalist church taking a foothold in Troy, Idaho.

The Spokesman-Review even plays a central role in the story, a noir style thriller that follows the conflict lived by every family that has gathered for Thanksgiving after 2015.

Walter uses the politics that divide, and the once fringe thought that has invaded the mainstream, to discuss coping in fragile times.

Rhys Kinnick took the route out. He’s been living in the woods an hour from Spokane as a hermit for seven years. No cellphone. No computer. He’s just been living by his wits against nature’s elements and a militia of raccoons, when one day his grandchildren show up on his doorstep. He’s been estranged from his family for so long he doesn’t even recognize them.

We learn that Kinnick is a cynical former environmental journalist for The Spokesman-Review, out of a job from layoffs, who had been watching his family drown in a well of conspiracy theories and raptured by a religious cult.

Shane, his son-in-law, follows every online conspiracy from a rigged NFL to media agendas and the coming of a new world order of some sort. “He was always seeing things online that explained the whole deal. Or deals online that explained the whole thing,” Walter writes.

When grandchildren Asher and his older sister Leah, 13, show up, Rhys is thrust back into the world he left behind. Only it’s become crazier. Their mother Bethany, Rhys’ only child, has gone. Their father Shane has joined the Church of Church of the Blessed Fire. They have a “men’s group” called the Army of the Lord, which gathers at a compound in the woods of Idaho up near the Canadian border to shoot guns and plan on how to defend their version of the Bible and pro football.

Shane’s plan is to marry Leah off to the pastor’s 19-year-old son. Bethany presumably escaped and left a note asking their grandfather to care for them.

That doesn’t work out so well when goons from the Army of the Lord show up, whack Kinnick, and take the grandchildren back into the woods.

Kinnick, being clueless, looks up Lucy Park, city editor of The Spokesman-Review and his former newsroom office affair. When Kinnick asks Park, “Who covers the radical right these days?” she answers, “Uh, the government reporter?”

Lucy hooks Kinnick up with Chuck Littlefield, a retired police officer with bouts of manic depression. Chuck “spent his days at the local tribal casinos where he lost so much money playing poker that he had to get a job” as a private investigator.

Together the two trek off into the Idaho wilderness to save the children and regain some semblance of self-respect.

This is a romp in the style of the best of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, and Walter has the writing chops to pull it off.

In a past life, we could imagine the main characters on a grainy black and white screen played by Humphrey Bogart, Katherine Hepburn and Edward G. Robinson. These days we’d get a Netflix limited-action series with Ryan Reynolds, Maya Rudolph and Paul Rudd. And I’d watch every single episode.

But we don’t need the screens to bring this story to life. Walter does that with his descriptive words and sentences that seem to flow into the minds and out of the mouths of his characters.

Walter examines contemporary concerns about politics, leadership and even the much-discussed topic of what it means to be a man in the second decade of the 21st century.

There’s a stoic and contemplative Rhys, the shoot-from-the hip Chuck. There’s Brian, Rhys’ only friend, whom he constantly angers, but who is more than willing to jump on the testosterone trail. Then, the toxic masculinity of Shane and his backwoods “army” of misfits that can’t shoot straight.

But Walter also infuses the novel with depth in the women characters, including Lucy Park and Joanie, Brian’s husband, and Leah, the exceptionally aware adolescent life commentator. It’s in them we find what the men are lacking: common sense.

“So Far Gone” is a compelling tale of a broken America and the struggles of the everyday few to try and bring back some semblance of being united.