Walter sends a reluctant hero from the wilderness outside Spokane into a splintered Northwest—and a divided nation

interview by Cathy Carroll

Spokane native son Jess Walter is earning national acclaim for his eleventh novel, So Far Gone, which opens in the wilderness outside his hometown, where a reclusive former journalist is living off-grid. When his grandchildren are kidnapped, he’s forced back into the world, launching—with a caustic ex-girlfriend, a bipolar retired detective and a furious friend—a razor-sharp, rollicking journey across a fractured America.

Describe what urged you to write So Far Gone.

I wrote So Far Gone with a feverish immediacy in 2024, as I watched the U.S. lurch toward what I feared would be a banal and absurd kind of authoritarianism. I kept thinking: What can a person do with all of this dread—political, environmental, societal, technological dread? At the same time, I watched the polarization in America cleaving families and friendships. Then: One day my phone bonged at me, informing me that I’d averaged almost six hours a day doomscrolling. All of that combined to create a story of a former environmental reporter who throws his phone out a window and turns his back on the world, a story that I pictured being fast, funny and suspenseful, a story that also imagined how we might begin to heal these fissures.

How did Spokane and the Northwest shape the novel?

It’s very much a Northwest story, a road trip from Southern Oregon to Eastern Washington, from a psychedelic music festival in British Columbia to a radical church in North Idaho. I think the Northwest has always been a place of extremes. Just take a seven-hour drive from Seattle to Missoula, Montana, and you see it. You’ll cross ocean harbors and mountain ranges, channeled scablands and rich farmland, ancient forests and glacial lakes. And you’ll cross even more cultures. The fabric of all of those cultures is straining at the seams right now. But it’s straining in every part of the country. I’ve heard from readers all over who don’t speak to family members because of politics, who don’t know what to do with their addiction to technology, who want to find a way back to a common sense of national purpose.

Did So Far Gone change how you’re thinking about what you’ll write next?

Every book changes the author, I suppose. I used to joke that I wrote each new book to get the taste of the last one out of my mouth. I’ve gained something of a reputation for jumping around, from satire to historical fiction, from epic romance to short fiction. Part of that comes from spending years inside a certain kind of story and wanting to do something else, to challenge myself as a writer. But mostly, I think the stories choose their own forms. A tale about two drug addicts trying to sell a big-screen television is simply going to go in a different direction than one about an actress getting abandoned in a tiny coastal town in Italy. The common denominator, I suppose, is care for my characters, a darkly comic bent and what my son calls my “toxic optimism.”

Your first book, Every Knee Shall Bow (Ruby Ridge) (1995), examined extremism and the tragic Idaho standoff between federal agents and a white separatist family. Do you see So Far Gone as part of that evolving conversation?

I think about Ruby Ridge a lot. In fact, I just finished a new afterword to that book, which will be rereleased in May. I can trace so many of the themes of our current discontent to that event; it almost feels like first foreshocks of a seismic rift that has affected our politics, our media and our culture at every level. The conspiracy theories I covered back then have become mainstream, and the sparks of anger and violence now smolder all over the country.