Thirty years ago, a Spokane reporter named Jess Walter wrote a full-length investigation of the standoff at Ruby Ridge in Boundary County, Idaho, an arrest-turned-shootout that killed a U.S. marshal and two civilians.
Much has changed in the three decades since. Walter is no longer known as a reporter but as the celebrated author of bestsellers including “Beautiful Ruins” and “The Cold Millions.” And armed civilian groups, he says, have proliferated in the public eye.
“I remember watching the issues that bubbled up around that,” Walter says from his home office in Spokane, “and how they were on the fringe of society. Now, government hatred couldn’t be more mainstream. If I went back 30 years ago and told myself where we’ve landed, I’d be shocked.”
Walter says his experience covering Ruby Ridge helped inform his new novel, “So Far Gone” (out June 10 from Harper), a contemporary Eastern Washington caper about who he calls “a hapless hero on a quest.”
Said hero is ex-journalist Rhys Kinnick, who’s spent the last eight years living off-grid by the small town of Springdale, Wash., where Walter lived as a child. Rhys is a politically liberal divorcee, more trusting of books than humans, who boils over during the first Trump term and sucker punches his right wing son-in-law at the worst Thanksgiving ever. Disgusted with himself and everyone else, he flees.
“No,” thinks Rhys, post-punch, of his own shortcomings, “it was he (Rhys) who had failed, he who couldn’t adjust, he who couldn’t deal with this banal, brutal idiocracy, he who couldn’t admit this was the world now.”
Kinnick’s grandchildren show up one day on the doorstep of his forest hermitage, their mother nowhere to be found, prompting him to reenter the society he’s left behind. This means confronting the Northern Idaho extremists his son-in-law has taken up with, the ones who, as Walter describes in the book, “ … were always skulking around Pride parades and MLK Day marches in Spokane and Coeur d’Alene, and who, during the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, had shown up for unsolicited security-guard duty at shopping malls and downtown stores, in their … Kevlar vests over their black T-shirts, their semi-automatic rifles BabyBjörned to their fat guts …”
While “The Cold Millions” dealt in Wobbly ideologies of yore, “So Far Gone” is Walter’s most concerted advance into modern-day politics. “I think of my process as bouncing between style and ideas,” he says. “So I’ll write about Italy (the setting of “Beautiful Ruins” and the short story collection “The Angel of Rome”) and then I’ll come home and stick my head out the car window, and describe what I see as we go down the road.”
What Walter saw this time, beyond BabyBjörned semiautos, was polarization. “This is the most that politics and culture have affected us, personally, since the 1960s,” he says. “Instead of a generation gap, we have a reality gap. That’s what I wanted to write about. Journalism is an institution that I believe in almost religiously. And journalism is in a crisis.”
Despite Rhys’ occasional polemics, “So Far Gone” is not a political statement masquerading as fiction but a breakneck adventure that rubs elbows with current events. “I don’t think fiction has ever really had a role in forming public opinion,” Walter says, downplaying the notion that his writing might actually change anyone’s mind. “That’s not my job.”
In addition to our shifting notion of reality, Walter wanted to explore the idea of retreating from society (a natural impetus for novelists). “I got really frustrated with my cellphone. I had the urge to turn away from the news,” he says of the media climate. “I wanted to create a character who does that to the highest extreme. Usually, the best way for me to work is to pose one question, create characters who have a heightened version of that question, and see where it leads.”
For Rhys, it leads to an unfinished magnum opus, technophobe tendencies and an appalling hygienic routine. When he finally buys a new phone — he threw the old one out his car window — he likens it to “a nosy neighbor with a constant supply of scary news, a pocketful of drip-drip dread and festering fear.”
Walter admits that “So Far Gone,” like some of his past work, is largely a comic novel. “Behind the comedy is really deep concern,” Walter says. “All these issues are serious issues. And I don’t think it’s so comic that you lose sight of that. Comedy is just the philosophical way I live in the world. I see humankind as defined by its follies, by its hubris. That leads you to comedy. And I definitely think that comedy intersects with other genres.”
Rhythmically snarky and surprisingly tender, “So Far Gone” will claim a spot near the Edgar Allan Poe Award-winning “Citizen Vince” in Walter’s impressive canon. Like that novel’s protagonist, Spokanite witness-protection participant Vince Camden, Rhys is an amateur philosopher adrift in the bewildering sea of human civilization, ergo, his own mind. Will he ever reach solid land? Does he even want to?
Having at last returned to society, Rhys despairs at the gun-toting militias, the ascendancy of fear in everyday political thought, the “eruptions of senseless violence, of anger and ignorance and greed and mendacity.” But then, like a true flâneur, he pulls back and remembers where he is.
“Nothing to see here,” Rhys thinks, “just America.”
