A Spokane Novelist’s Take on Modern Northwest Noir

Spokane novelist Jess Walter’s delightfully grim So Far Gone (Harper Collins, 2025) starts off one rainy night when an embittered recluse named Rhys Kinnick is suddenly confronted with two small children who show up unannounced on his doorstep. This is particularly surprising to Kinnick because he lives in the middle of nowhere — nowhere being well outside of Spokane, at the end of a long series of dirt roads, in an isolated cabin. It had been years since he had so much as spoken to another human being. How on earth did these kids find him? Why do they want to? And who are they?

This last question proves mortifying: The little girl and boy are his grandchildren, who he last remembered seeing seven years ago, on Thanksgiving, after fleeing his beloved daughter Bethany’s house in the wake of a fight with her husband Shane, who was an obsessive right-wing conspiracy theorist who practiced, in Kinnick’s words, “crazy eagle four-wheel-drive oppo-Christian patriotism” that ventured “ever further into the paranoid exurbs of American fundamentalism.”

Driving away from their home in a rage, he had taken out his iPhone and seen that Bethany had left him two voicemail messages. “He turned his iPhone over in his hand. Remarkable. Every human connection he had left was contained inside its miniature electronic circuitry…. [W]ithout this $600 Pop-Tart of modern science, he had no way of reaching any other human being, and they had no way of reaching him.” After a few more moments of perceptively meditating on this device, Kinnick throws it out the window.

Now, confronted with his grandchildren seven years later, in the first of the novel’s long series of self-flagellating episodes, Kinnick is mightily ashamed. Three or four years before, he now remembered, his daughter had tracked him down and brought the kids out here for a brief visit that hadn’t gone well. What has happened in the years since to turn him into someone so distorted that he can’t recognize his own grandchildren? “Rhys Kinnick nearly doubled over with a previously undiagnosed condition: regret. And this single, overwhelming thought: What have I done?” 

The moment is the beginning of a long reckoning with his, and society’s, failings.

The grandkids, it turns out, have been brought to Kinnick’s place by their neighbor, who also brought along a letter from their mother, who had vanished without explanation a few days before, directing them to Kinnick’s place if her husband went looking for her instead of staying home with the kids.

Kinnick, a forcibly retired newspaper reporter, had decided to isolate himself from society by moving into this tiny cabin, which had been built and abandoned years before by his grandfather. It lacked electricity, running water — pretty much any comfort of civilization you can think of. The move was an attempt on Kinnick’s part both to hide from a world where things not only “got worse, but exponentially more insane,” and to follow in Henry David Thoreau’s footsteps, coming out of his isolation experiment with a new book, to be entitled The Atlas of Wisdom.

After seven years, however, he had little to show for the effort other than a massive collection of more or less incoherent notebooks containing random quotes from other writers. And the arrival of his grandchildren has him beginning to wonder if his jumping off the grid was more an exercise in bitter self-indulgence than a quest for enlightenment.

Kinnick invites his grandchildren in, and there follows a picaresque search for Bethany through remote stretches of Idaho, where armed sociopathic rightwing religious zealots thrive; to a forested spot in Canada just over the border, where a convention of latter-day hippies devoted to various psychedelic drugs and experiences have gathered; to the rural areas around Spokane, where Kinnick finds help from some old friends; and to Spokane itself, where Kinnick confronts his own professional past as a reporter, most recently for the Spokesman-Review, where his career had petered out in a way familiar to any journalist of a certain age: “After getting a degree in natural sciences Kinnick had been an environmental journalist for 30 years, at a paper in Oregon, at a Portland magazine that went under, and finally, in Spokane, where the foundering newspaper ‘offered’ him a buyout in 2015.”

Once he is reunited with his grandkids and sets off on his misadventure in search of their mother, a great deal of violence ensues — much of it directed at the hapless Kinnick, to noirishly comic effect.

Most of the novel’s characters (aside from Kinnick) are cartoonishly rendered, and at times the novel’s plot veers into Wile E. Coyote-esque territory. But the novel shines both in its northwest noir mood and in frequent insightful observations rendered in Kinnick’s wonderful language. These asides, distributed throughout like delicious dried fruits in a doughy pastry, make for wonderful reading. You keep turning the pages more for them than for the aggressively churning plot. 

Kinnick is particularly preoccupied with the rightward turn the country as a whole has taken: “Whatever their [voters’] motivation, for Kinnick, it was all just part of a long sad cultural slide that he’d had the misfortune of witnessing firsthand (celebrity entertainment bleeding into government, cable TV eroding newspapers, information collapsing into a huge Internet-size black hole of bad ideas, bald-faced lies, and bullshit, until the literal worst person in America got elected president.”

When not being beaten up by sociopathic Christian patriot bikers (or by himself), Kinnick just keeps the meditations coming. After seven years without a phone, he finally consents to getting a new one. Result: “It was one of the hardest adjustments for Kinnick, owning a cell phone again…. He tried not reading the news on his phone, but after so long away, it was impossible, like he’d spent seven years quitting booze and then someone had assigned him his own, pocket-size twenty-four-hour bartender.”

It is a kind of laughing-to-keep-from-crying experience, reading this book, but it ends up being an oddly consoling and satisfying exercise in confronting our dismal political and social present. Nothing gives a reader more hope than an entertaining tale of despair, wittily rendered.