Book Review: So Far Gone by Jess Walter

I like books that are funny. I like books that treat flawed characters tenderly. I like books about parents and children. I like books about human absurdity and folly. I like quest narratives. I like books about people living in cabins. I like books by writers who can sketch minor characters with so much power that you remember them as vividly as the major characters. There are more things that I like about Jess Walter’s latest novel, but you get the picture. If you like any of the things I like, you’ll like So Far Gone too.

Let’s start with a line: ‘Technically, I think once you’ve fucked everything up, the only way to fix it is to fuck everything down.’ First, that’s just a great line, and you’ll find plenty of those in So Far Gone. Second, it exemplifies virtually everything in the list of things I like that I bored you with above. It’s funny. It’s a wry and tender moment that shows a character acknowledging their own error. The key thing that the speaker, Rhys Kinnick, fucked up when he withdrew to a shack in the woods in 2016 was the relationship with his daughter, Bethany, and his grandchildren.

It suggests that given the error-proneness of human endeavour, all attempts to fix past mistakes are likely to be as strewn with error as the original fucking-up was. It accurately describes the messiness and folly of the quest Kinnick goes on to repair the sequence of mistakes that have contributed to Bethany going AWOL and Kinnick failing to recognise his grandkids when they’re dropped off at his shack by a neighbour, a quest that leads Kinnick to leave his cabin after seven years in the wilderness and encounter a noble, love-crazed, loony ex-cop, a sociopathic poacher-turned-conspiracy-theorist-Christian-nationalist-soldier, a psychedelic trip guide with an intermittent faux-British accent, and a trainee-priest with a pugilistic past, among others.

Ultimately, no book about a man withdrawing to the woods, especially not by an American author, could ever avoid the shadow of Walden, and Walter makes no effort to do so. Thoreau provides the novel’s epigraph, but also the novel’s thematic conclusion – in yet another wonderful line that encapsulates so much of what makes this such a good novel: ‘I’m starting to think Thoreau might have been full of shit. If we aren’t living for others, maybe we aren’t really living.’

As a comment on the history of the western fetishisation of individualism and its terrifying ramifications through which we are all now living, perhaps these two sentences alone are enough to point out just why So Far Gone is a book worth reading right now.