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 simply a wistful elegy — immoderate mightiness accidental a eulogy — to a kinder, gentler time. Its compelling antihero, sixty-something Rhys Kinnick, has spent 7 years successful self-imposed exile, occupying a cinder artifact compartment successful a distant portion of Washington state. His attempts to amended the location his gramps erstwhile envisioned arsenic a thriving sheep workplace person stalled, but helium has managed to work much than 900 books during his stay, and to constitute 2,000-plus pages of a still-unfinished metaphysical measurement ambitiously titled “The Atlas of Wisdom.” He reassures himself that successful becoming a hermit — leaving down his daughter, Bethany, and grandchildren, Leah and Asher — and eschewing astir carnal comforts, he’s modeling Thoreau’s “Walden.”

In the uncommon encounters helium has with different humans, helium enjoys quoting favourite passages from it, specified as: “A antheral is affluent successful proportionality to the fig of things helium tin spend to fto alone.” And he’s fto unsocial rather a few.

(Harper)

His “step aside” was successful portion sparked by a 2016 Thanksgiving altercation with his daughter’s dangerously sanctimonious husband, Shane. He’s a born-again Christian whose adherence to progressively bizarre conspiracy theories person him believing that adjacent 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 wide orthodoxy whose extremity end was to subsume bully Christians similar Shane into an immoral, one-world socialist nightmare successful which radical pooped successful the incorrect bathroom.”

Rhys tries valiantly not to prosecute with Shane during this vacation gathering, but for years he’s hopelessly observed the “long bittersweet taste decline” that led to “the literal worst person successful America” getting elected president, and helium can’t instrumentality it anymore. What’s more, he’s been laid disconnected from his occupation arsenic an biology newsman for a newspaper, and his woman has told him she doesn’t ever privation to spot him again. When helium mutters aloud what helium is reasoning astir Shane — “Daughter joined an idiot” — each hellhole breaks loose, prompting Rhys to fly without mentation oregon apology. At archetypal helium has nary thought wherever he’s going, but, impulsively pitching his compartment telephone retired the window, helium steers his car toward the cabin, wherever he’ll instrumentality imperishable refuge.

Among the galore melancholy pleasures of this caller is that Walter synthesizes that tendency galore of america consciousness — and mostly defy — to crawl nether the covers and not reemerge for a fewer decades, to caregiver a “bone-deep sorrow.” Rhys luxuriates successful his solitude and deficiency of responsibility, detaching to specified a grade that, successful 2020, he’s mostly unaware of the COVID-19 pandemic until his barber insists helium don a mask. He’s startled retired of his oblivion a fewer years aboriginal by a sound astatine the beforehand door.

On his structure basal a lad and a miss helium astatine archetypal mistakes for strangers. “What are you good capitalists selling?” helium asks them. “Magazines oregon cocoa bars?”

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

It’s past that Rhys comprehends that successful protecting himself helium has failed to beryllium determination for his beloved ex-wife, Celia, who’s since died of lymphoma, oregon for his daughter, who has mysteriously tally away, leaving a enactment to a neighbour instructing her to instrumentality her kids to enactment with her estranged father. “He is simply a recluse who chopped disconnected interaction with our household and present lives successful squalor,” she writes. Reading her words, remorse hits similar a ton of bricks. He asks himself: What person I done? Having spent the past 7 years successful a authorities of self-absorption — or, arsenic his ex-girlfriend Lucy aboriginal puts it: “You’ve conscionable been up determination pouting?” — his caller quest is simply to atone.

Throughout the novel, Rhys references Kant, De Beauvoir, Sartre, Virginia Woolf and Epictetus, among others, utilizing cognition arsenic a balm and flight hatch. He mourns the illness of civilization “into a immense internet-size achromatic spread of atrocious ideas, bald-faced lies, and bullshit.” But into that cauldron helium indispensable erstwhile again dive, arsenic his daughter’s whereabouts stay unknown, his 13-year-old granddaughter has been promised by her stepfather to the 19-year-old lad of a extremist religion pastor, and his grandson is precocious for a chess lucifer successful Spokane. He starts up his 1978 Audi 100 — “half car, fractional garbage. Carbage” — and the 3 instrumentality off.

Rhys awkwardly rebuilds bridges with friends and household successful a bid of adventures and misadventures, and dilatory registers what he’s missed during his absence. “Those changes had a unusual prime to them,” helium observes. “Not lone did they look broadly unimpressive, but successful immoderate cases, they seemed similar steps backwards.” For example, “not lone were determination nary flying cars, determination seemed to beryllium much large pickups and SUVs than ever.”

Walter is simply a slyly adept societal critic, and has intelligibly invested his protagonist with each of the outrage and heartbreak helium himself feels astir the acheronian people our satellite has taken. He’s besides invested his protagonist with a self-deprecating consciousness of wit that keeps his pessimism from veering into maudlin territory. If there’s anticipation to beryllium recovered wrong this harsh landscape, it’s successful our transportation with 1 different — an antidote to despair. We each person to unrecorded done a acheronian play present and then, Rhys comforts himself. Or, to paraphrase a Virginia Woolf enactment from “To the Lighthouse” that Rhys invoked earlier: What gets america done are “little regular miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly successful the dark.” Or for that matter, novels similar this one.

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