I know this is a lot to ask but can you take the kids to my father Rhys Kinnick. He is a recluse who cut off contact with our family and now lives in squalor in a cabin north of Spokane. [..] He lives off the grid.
This is a neat encapsulation of the current status of Rhys Kinnick by his daughter Bethany, who has vanished. Her husband Shane is off to look for her, and as a contingency measure, she’s left a note for her neighbour to deliver her two children — Leah, age 13, and Asher, age 9 — to their grandfather Rhys.
Set in Jeff Walters’ beloved Spokane and its environs, So Far Gone is largely about Rhys Kinnick, but also has chapters devoted to Lucy (Rhys’s sometime lover), Chuck (Rhys’s friend), Bethany (Rhy’s daughter), each of the children, Shane (Bethany’s husband), and Brian (Rhy’s friend). This is a lot of different points of view, and could easily lead to indistinct characters and discombobulated readers. In this book, though, the shifts are quite natural, and Walters makes each of the characters wonderfully distinct. He manages to keep up the pace as well, which is often difficult when multiple characters are describing the same events from different points of view.
The novel is most certainly current.
The dam burst seven and a half years ago, in Grants Pass, Oregon, 2016, forty minutes before Thanksgiving dinner, when Rhys Kinnick realized there was no place left for him in this risible world. “No politics”, Bethan had proposed. [..] And the first two hours were fine. [..]
Shane leaned across the recliners and confided to Kinnick: “They’re in on it too, you know.”
It, Rhys knew by now, was the elaborate and all-encompassing conspiracy to indoctrinate Americans into a Satanic liberal orthodoxy whose end goal was to subsume good Christians like Shane into an immoral, one-world, socialist nightmare in which people pooped in the wrong bathrooms.
The fallout from that argument and subsequent fist-fight led to Rhys’ semi-voluntary separation from his family and his phone and most modern technology, and his retirement to a small house in the woods near Spokane. Seven years later, just post-pandemic, his grandkids arrive at his door.
All is not well with Bethany and Shane and the kids: Shane has drifted further and further into a right-wing nationalist Christian sect, while Bethany is less and less comfortable with this religious direction. The kids are supposedly home-schooled, and now Shane and the pastor want to “betroth” 13-year-old Leah to the pastor’s 19-year-old son David.
In an early twist, one of many gentle subversions to come, it turns out that Leah actually has something of a crush on David:
No, she didn’t necessarily want to get married at sixteen, but she didn’t see the harm in getting a promise ring from a nice boy like David, who was smart and sensitive, and a reader like her, and who had bright green eyes.
I was expecting a few chapters along the lines of Little House on the Prairie, where the kids learned to survive in Rhys’s land without modern conveniences, and began to enjoy playing in the stream, but the book moves right along. That same day, Asher has a chess tournament in Spokane.
Rhys noticed two men descending either side of a tall black Ram pickup truck. Something about the men didn’t scream chess to Rhys. [..] There was a sticker on its tailgate that at first Rhys thought was an old email logo, until he read more closely and saw that AOL actually stood for “Army of the Lord.”
The men are from Shane’s religious/militaristic sect, and kidnap the children, leaving Rhys on the ground with a broken cheekbone. He has a few (but very good) friends, though, and is determined to get the children back. The tension in the novel increases considerably as events shift to the AOL compound in Idaho.
It would be easy to demonize Shane, but this author has a gift for humanizing even the less likely characters.
Shane Collins, on probation for possession, found himself weeping at a court-ordered NA meeting .. he felt the Lord come into his soul. [..] He remembered thinking: That is what God can do. He can make the fear go away.
Walter is searing about these religious/military groups:
fanatics who 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 Don’t-Tread-On-Me-I-got-a-small-dick pickup trucks and their Kevlar vests over their black Tshirts, their semiautomatic rifles Baby-Bjorned to their fat guts like the shithead soldier/cop-wannabees they were (even though none of them had the stones to go and join the actual military, or the brains to pass a simple law enforcement test)
Rhys is at the center of this novel, but the other characters are far from minor, including Bethany’s aging ex-boyfriend who plays in a band, Rhys’ ex-girlfriend who is Asian-American, and and Chuck Littlefield, retired homicide detective. Rhys’ Native American friends Brian and Joanie are wry and funny.
[Asher] “Do you have a warrior name?”
“Sure,” Brian said. “I am known to my people as Standing Water. My older sister is Flooded Basement and my younger brother is Ruined Carpet. [..] And you?”
Asher took his hand. “I am known to my people as Asher”, he said.
And yet, Brian and Joanie are far more than wisecracking Native American sidekicks. Brian is ex-Army, a noted sharpshooter, with a life and personality that exist well beyond the perimeters of the novel. Joanie has her own personality, and something of a history with Rhys.
The stakes are high (kidnapped children, armed fundamentalist gunmen, lost women …) and yet, as you see, the author infuses it with wry humour. At a time when it is all too easy to be depressed about the state of the world, he also somehow manages to bring in a sense of hope, forgiveness and reconciliation.
Jeff Walters continues to be one of my favourite American authors.
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