SO FAR GONE rating: four stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐.
I love the concept of SO FAR GONE by Jess Walter (HarperCollins, June 10, 2025). In 2016, former writer and journalist Rhys Kinnick pitches his smartphone out of his car window, drives to 40 acres in Northwest Washington State (where his grandfather left a cinderblock dwelling now inhabited by raccoons), and ekes out a sort-of-WALDEN-like existence off the grid–if Thoreau had Spokane neighbors who became good friends (they would have been Massachusett, in Thoreau’s case) and gone grocery shopping.1Actually, according to this New Yorker piece by Kathryn Shultz, “The Moral Judgments of Henry David Thoreau” (October 12, 2015), Walden Pond was an easy walk to Thoreau’s mother’s house, he dined regularly with friends, he played the host himself, and his sisters brought him food, so if there had been a grid to be on in 1845-47, Thoreau would have been on it, all the while moralizing against it.
Kinnick’s daughter Bethany is married to a Christian nationalist conspiracy theorist named Shane, whom Rhys punches in the face at Thanksgiving dinner. This rash decision, plus the 2016 election, are factors in Rhys’s decision to go and live as a near hermit. He has no friends, and his family, he supposes, do not need him. The world has no more use for him at all. If I had 40 acres I’d be tempted to throw my phone out the window and go live off the grid too, but could not because of my family, which is kind of the point. But the insanity of today’s ultra-connected and distracted world, and the alienation from the natural world, is also the point. People need each other, no matter how messed up the world we inhabit. Even if we are introverts, curmudgeons, iconoclasts, and fed up to the teeth with it all.
As our hero learns when, eight years after his disappearance, his two grandchildren show up on his doorstep in the company of a neighbor and report that his daughter Bethany has disappeared. Now what?
The author did his research on Christian Nationalism. Wacko men’s retreats,2here is a retreat light on the Bible study and heavy on shooting guns. betrothals of children to adults, forced conversion therapy of boys and men who don’t even think they are gay, demands for women to unconditionally submit to their husbands,3 I recommend the amazing memoir A WELL-TRAINED WIFE by Tia Levings about which I blogged on 3/11/2024 if you want to know where total submission can lead. completely unhinged conspiracy theories. . .as someone who came out of this deranged culture in 2001, all of this tracks.
I was a bit skeptical of the reason the author provides for Shane’s descent into madness. It’s possible that fear drives people into extremist right wing cults, but in my case, in 1990 I really wanted to make God happy and do religion “correctly”–get everything precisely right. Okay, so maybe it was my fear. I wanted a big family that God was extremely happy with, that would be absolutely safe from harm and evil. I wanted to WIN. Which is not the point of the Christian faith at all.4For more on this if you’re interested, check out NOT IN IT TO WIN IT by Andy Stanley which I just loaned to my priest.
This book would make a wonderful series. Great characters, zany road trip adventures, a hilarious detective, ecology. The rootedness of the novel in a specific place was charming; the author is based in Spokane. It reminded me of MOTHER-DAUGHTER MURDER NIGHT by Nina Simon in that way, set lovingly in the author’s stomping grounds.5 See my blog of August 2, 2023 on Simon’s novel. It’s deeply ironic too: any extreme form of escape from healthy interrelationships is “so far gone,” whether in a cabin all alone or in a compound full of zealots.
Reading in context:
Other books in which children end up with grownups other than their parents and mutual transformation occurs: THE GOOD LORD BIRD by James McBride (Penguin Random House, 2013) TRUE GRIT by Charles Portis (Simon & Schuster 1968), NEWS OF THE WORLD by Paulette Jiles (HarperCollins, 2016), and several children’s classics. The ability of the children to change their grandfather and vice versa in a natural setting was not given enough pages in my opinion, which is the only reason this is not a five-star book.
The only other book I’ve read by Jess Walter is BEAUTIFUL RUINS which my LibraryThing shelf says I finished on March 1, 2013. I ate it all up, gave it 4 stars, and have a copy in my home collection.
What I’m reading now:
I just finished F*CKED UP FAIRY TALES by Liz Gotauco (W. W. Norton & Company, October 2025) and there is a podcast! Good thing too, because I am sad that the book is over.
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