There’s a flashback in Jess Walter’s new novel where Rhys, a grizzled former journalist increasingly alienated by the baffling political realities of the world, throws his cell phone out the car window after punching his MAGA son-in-law in the face at Thanksgiving 2016. The years between then and now—between that presidential election and the most recent one—are the setting for So Far Gone, Walter’s beautifully written, propulsive, and slightly madcap caper through personal-is-political-is-personal drama.
In many ways, So Far Gone is a novel about a disconnection by design. “It’s not an accident,” insists Walter, for whom the cellphone is the novel’s only irredeemable character (aside from some destructively enterprising raccoons). “What the tech companies are doing is cigarette company-level bad. They have willfully created these products and programs that drive us toward more and more extreme thought and that silo us in pockets of information and misinformation,” he told me.
Right before he punched his daughter’s husband, Rhys’s son-in-law had claimed that the entire NFL is rigged, insisting that the games are fixed as part of a left-wing conspiracy at the hands of the Obamas. It is the culmination of a conversation Rhys has been trying to avoid, but then tackles –literally – head on. Inevitably, it is a moment of rupture, both in Rhys’s idea of himself and in his relationship with his family. The journalist, for whom the election results reveal that the asshole ceiling was much higher than he thought, decides to move off the grid entirely and seclude himself in a cabin on an old plot of family land surrounded only by books. When the novel opens seven years later with two parentless children showing up at his remote home in the Pacific Northwest, he doesn’t recognize them as his own grandkids.
But as much as So Far Gone is about “this fissure that has opened up in America over the last 10, 12, 15 years,” it is also about messy, often humorous, but oh-so human attempts at reconnection, at meaning, at something beyond. Bethany, Rhys’s former-addict daughter, has temporarily ditched her children and fled to a psychedelic rock festival in Canada, where her high-school sweetheart is performing a song she wrote decades before. Her husband Dean, also a former addict, seeks affirmation in far-right conspiracy theories and training with a cult militia known as the Church of the Blessed Fire. Their daughter, 13-year-old Leah, writes wish-fulfilment religious high fantasy and believes she is destined to marry the pastor’s gay son; while her brother Asher, dismayed at the insanity around him, merely seeks to understand—everything. And Rhys?
After the shock of his grandchildren’s arrival forces him back into the world, the former journalist is beginning to question his seven years of seclusion. “What is the point in living, Rhys asks, “If we’re not living for other people? And so, over the course of the novel, we witness him slowly trying to reintegrate into a world, and a social circle, he had abandoned – there’s Brian, the former best friend who is now lining up to add to Rhys’s zygomatic arch injuries after Rhys disastrously bared his soul to Brian’s wife. (The novel, incidentally, might just hold the world record for incongruous mentions of the term “zygomatic arch,”—jawbone—in fiction). There’s Lucy, his former editor (and ex), along with her ex, a self-described “old, tired, half-horny, twice-divorced cop with bad knees, three estranged kids and emotional dysregulation and bipolar issues.” And there’s Bethany, his only child, with whom he has spoken just once since he attempted to take out her spouse.
Walter says that he often conducts a thought experiment in the fiction that he writes. On the eve of the 2016 election, a moment Walter describes as “probably when So Far Gone was born, even though it would be years before I wrote it,” he, like his protagonist, was on the verge of tuning out: as Rhys puts it, “At some point, you look around, and think, I don’t belong here anymore. I don’t want to have anything to do with any of this.” And so, Walters’ thought experiment was a question about participation in the world: “How do I stay engaged in the world, in politics, in my family, and those people who I disagree with— neighbors and friends and other writers whose views are counter to mine. How do I stay connected with the world and with them? Without… without being overwhelmed by it, without being swamped by it?”
The best answer he can give is humor. “We don’t lose our sense of humor: our sense of humor connects us as humans, it keeps us from despair, but also from being so sure of ourselves that we don’t take in other opinions. So, I start with humor. I mean, we have to—America feels a little bit like a clown car right now, and clowns are both terrifying and funny.” An apt description—and one that also works for So Far Gone.
It took writing So Far Gone for the results of Walter’s thought experiment to play out. “I jumped into the novel with this idea that Rhys had been driven into the woods by the frustrating political realities of the world,” he says, later coming to realize that in fact, his protagonist, having committed an act of violence and run off to the woods, had “taken the far-right playbook and in many ways become the thing he loathes, someone who can’t deal with reality and so goes and hides in something else.” It was only once he was writing Rhys’s story arc that Walter had his moment of realization, one he shares with the reader and the protagonist alike: “underneath it all,” he says, “are these human beings trying to grapple with weirdly the same things.” Shared anxieties, shared fears about a world—or worlds these characters can no longer recognize or comprehend. “That kind of realization is the great joy of writing fiction, and it makes you question even yourself and your own beliefs.”
The joy Walter finds in writing finds an echo in an all-round voraciousness—to his journalistic approach (“you get to do different things all the time and quickly become an expert in something new”), to his experimentation with genre (“it keeps writing fresh and alive”), to his connection to the writing of others (“I find myself often thinking about the way a writer approaches work, they’re even thinking about their sentences, the rhythm of their sentences. I’ll read a writer like Roberto Bolaño and think, how is this voice so engaging? And sometimes I’ll find a voice that almost baffles me and makes me want to read all of his books until I understand what it is he’s even doing.”) He keeps what he calls “working shelves” in his office, an ever-changing collection of books (of all genres, of course) to inspire and inform whatever he’s writing at the time. Does he ever worry that those other voices will seep into his own work? “I think all of our particular writing voices are made up of the things that we love, the things that clicked with us,” he says.
“When I was starting out writing, my co-pilot was my insecurity, and every time I glanced over it was saying, ‘Be better, be smarter.’ But then that co-pilot moved to the back of the plane, and sitting in that seat now are my influences, those writers I respect. Almost always if I read something great, I want to race off and start writing. You know, it’s like hearing great music. It just opens these doors into musical areas you hadn’t thought of before. I always find that thrilling.”
Despite the subject matter and what we’re all euphemistically calling the “current situation” that it depicts, the great joy Walter finds in writing fiction sparkles off the pages of So Far Gone. In some ways, its wry noirishness marks yet another new genre for the author and former journalist whose previous work has spanned the gamut from literary fiction (the much-lauded Beautiful Ruins) to mysteries (Citizen Vince, winner of the Edgar Allen Poe award) and thrillers (The Zero, a National Book Award finalist).
“I have to tell you, I’m surprised that so many writers follow one genre. To me, it would be like eating the same meal every day,” Walter laughs, when asked about his genre-fluidity. “To limit myself to writing only one genre feels like some sort of commercial decision, and if I were driven by commercial decisions, I probably wouldn’t even be a writer at all, you know? I’d probably be an investment banker or something.” He tells a story about a bookseller who told him she’s always confused about how to shelve his books; she has even considered starting a dedicated Jess Walter section. Says the author, “I thought it was about the best compliment anyone could get.”
Jess Walter is the award-winning, best-selling author of eight novels, two books of short stories and one nonfiction book. He will be talking about his latest, So Far Gone, at Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures on October 27, 2025.
