Rhys Kinnick, the protagonist of Jess Walter’s new novel, So Far Gone, throws his phone out the window. Fed up with the current era’s political and socioeconomic plights, he punches his conspiracy-theorist son-in-law in the face and retreats to a cinder-block house in the middle of the woods, off the grid and a mile from its nearest neighbors — based on the house Walter lived in as a child and still owned by his family.

“It’s in the northwest of Spokane, along the Spokane Indian Reservation, and that’s where I lived as a kid in the early ‘70s, and where I spent the summers bucking bales as a teenager, and where I still go for walks out in the forest for inspiration,” Walter told me over the phone ahead of his upcoming Portland Book Festival appearance. “It’s very much the world that I know, and while I don’t think I’ve ever fantasized moving up there completely, I’ve always loved going up there and and noticing what it’s like to have have civilization drop away … to have the stars come back out, and to have that incredible silence that we just completely miss when we live in cities.”

Walter, Edgar Allan Poe Award recipient and National Book Award finalist, is the author of seven novels, two collections of short stories, and a nonfiction book. On Nov. 8, he will be in Portland for Literary Arts’ Portland Book Festival, where he will discuss humor with novelist Kristen Arnett in an 11:30 a.m. session called “Funny Story,” moderated by OPB’s Jess Hazel. Advance tickets to the festival start at $18; complete ticket information is available here.

So Far Gone, published in June by Harper Collins, follows Kinnick, a reclusive former environmental reporter whose grandchildren one day show up on his doorstep. To his horror, he must embark on a bizarro road trip to try to solve the mystery of his missing daughter while saving his grandchildren from indoctrination into a radical Christian nationalist church.

Walter, who lives in Spokane and, like his main character, began his writing career as a journalist, told me, “The best way to encounter any writer is on the page.” He hopes that audience members of all ages will be inquisitive, picking up books not only at the event, but also ahead of time.

“I just spoke to a college class of people who want to be historians. And as always, when I meet with younger people, I come away inspired and hopeful,” he said, discussing audiences, classrooms, and the way “hope” can span generations. “It is true that it can be harder to find hope, but I’m not sure hope cares whether you believe in it or not. It just comes about because people get fed up and strive for a better world … and every time I hear a younger politician or a younger author talk about envisioning a better world, I think, I know it’s possible and maybe even probable.

“So, I think there are some generational differences, and yet I think the natural inclination is to imagine a better world and then start striving for it. And that’s what I certainly hope happens.… I tend to go beyond the differences in generations to the commonalities in humans, and I think it’s a natural state to not only hope for a better world but work toward it.”

I talked with Walter about his career and role of writers and hope in the modern world. The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

You began your career as a journalist. How has that trajectory affected the writing you do now?

Walter: You know, when I started being a journalist, it was a pretty traditional path to being a novelist. I think with the decline of daily newspapers, that path has grown over with weeds a little bit, and most writers find their way through MFA programs now. But for me, being a working-class blue-collar kid, newspapers were the best path I could have taken … both because I got my chops as a writer, but also, I think it made me more outward-looking than I would have been otherwise. Journalism allowed me to look at systems and institutions, and to now take fictional characters and put them into worlds that I covered as a reporter. So, for me, I think it really opened my eyes to what my fiction should be about.

Were there any journalists in particular that you looked up to and who made you want to enter the field?

Only about a million of them. Early on, there’s Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway, and later, writers like Joan Didion — watching the way they honed their craft through nonfiction. There are also thriller writers like Laura Litman, who bring their journalism to the page. I think the biggest influences for me were William Kennedy, who covered Albany [NY] as a reporter and then turned his eyes on it as a novelist in the Albany Cycle, and Charles Portis, who I owe a big debt to with So Far Gone, because after his reporting career, he wrote these amazing books — many of which were road-trip books, much like my book.

How does journalism figure in So Far Gone? Do you feel like you were able to bring a lot of it to this book?

In some ways, it’s a little bit of an analogy for the career itself. Rhys Kinnock, the main character, is a journalist who has lost his job. More than that, he’s lost his identity and the worldview that he had as an environmental reporter. He has moved off the grid and sort of turned his back on a society that he feels has abandoned reason and empiricism and justice, and is so fed up with the Trump era that he has vowed to stay on this little piece of land and work on his life’s work, an atlas of natural wisdom that uses environmentalism to rethink the philosophical roots of society. That’s where he is when his grandchildren show up on his doorstep, so he’s got to come out of his cocoon and find his way back into the world.

What was your inspiration for Rhys’s character?

There were many inspirations. One was my own feeling of dislocation from a society that seemed to be lurching away from the things I believed in, and another was a kind of fatigue with technology. The very first thing that Rhys does after punching his conspiracy-theorist son-in-law at a Thanksgiving dinner is throw his cell phone out the window. And my own anger at the way this technology that we should be using has actually started using us had me imagining this character throwing his cellphone out the car window. It was almost a wish fulfillment that started the book — someone imagining that they could live off the grid without this technology that is sort of enslaving us.

I fantasize about that all the time, dropping my phone into the river.

Yeah, the image that I kept having was of him watching it bounce in his rearview mirror as it bounces once on the highway and then flops into the median. I wish I could do a more manageable version of that. One day before I started working on this, my phone [beeped] at me on a Sunday and told me that I’d spent an average of six hours a day on it that week. So my goal has been just to get my phone usage back under an hour a day.

Which is somehow much harder than it seems. The book is also described as a road trip. Is movement an important theme in the book?

It’s very much a road trip. The novel starts with Rhys having lived off the grid for seven years, and his grandchildren show up. His daughter is missing, and he’s got to go find her and reconcile the fact that his grandchildren have found their way into a Christian nationalist church. I very much knew I was writing a road-trip novel, so it starts in Spokane, adventures up to British Columbia and a wild electronica music festival, and also to a compound in North Idaho where the Christian nationalists have set up. I knew Rhys would be crossing those borders, one into British Columbia, the other into North Idaho, but then he would return home. You know, like all odysseys, they cross borders and then return. And that was very much the path that, narratively, the novel took, and that I wanted the character to take.

You’ve mentioned in a previous interview, “the conflict between reality and the stories we tell ourselves to justify our behaviors.” Can you talk a little bit more about that?

For me, So Far Gone is really a book about what I’ve taken to calling the “reality gap,” which is deepening in our politics. More than half of Americans now say they get their news from social media, which is a little bit insane if you think about it, because what you’re basically getting is a silo with people who believe the way you do, making pithy remarks about the news. It’s not only a secondary source of what’s happening in the world, but it’s not even a source. It’s something filtered through all these strange things. I think that’s caused us to live in not only different sets of beliefs, but in entirely different sets of reality. It’s impossible to imagine a democracy functioning in that way, which is why I think it’s currently close to not functioning. 

To bring that down to the personal level was what I really wanted to do. I wanted Rhys, his daughter, his grandchildren, and his son-in-law to have to find their way back to each other … find their way across these reality gaps and chasms that have opened up in our families and in our neighborhoods and in our communities and in the country. And that was sort of a challenge for me. It was like, if somehow I could imagine this one family finding its way back to it to themselves, then maybe in a larger way, I could imagine healing that fissure between urban and rural, between college educated and not college educated, between voters, that has reached into our daily lives in a way that I don’t think it had before.

Within that description, it makes me think about a resurgence of connectivity and of paranoia in literature that we saw with a lot of ‘60s and ‘70s writing: Thomas Pynchon [Inherent Vice, The Crying of Lot 49] and the new movie and his new book, for example. There’s always a lot of paranoia there. Do you feel like there’s a sense of paranoia also making its way into your work due to the state of the world?

Yeah, definitely. I think that’s an interesting parallel, because when I started thinking about the reality gap, what popped into my mind was the generation gap of the late ’60s and early ‘70s, and there were a couple of ways in which that paranoia played out. One was the sort of psychedelic nature of drug use and the way that springs a different kind of paranoia

Now, paranoia has made its way deeply into the mainstream. A third of Americans believe that microchips were inserted in their body when they took the Covid-19 vaccine. A third of Americans believe Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. Twenty percent of Americans think that the assassination attempt on Donald Trump was faked. We live in a world where conspiracy theory and paranoia, and these leaps of rational thought, are very much a part of our normal political daily fabric. That’s a strange place to find yourself. And of course, it should make its way into literature as well.

Don DeLillo showed in his novels the way paranoia could creep into the environmental world in terms of terrorism, and I very much find myself thinking about writers like that, and trying to describe in 2025 how paranoia and conspiracy theory are with us every moment. Every time we open the news, turn on the news, pick up a newspaper, or grab our phones to find out what’s happening in the world, we are getting a version of reality that is almost through a kaleidoscope of paranoia and conspiracy, and that kind of fractured reality.

Do you feel like satire also plays a role in your work to expose these things?

I come by satire very naturally, and by humor very naturally. Satire is often the refuge of people who are heartbroken by the world, and I think of myself sometimes as a more hopeful satirist. I think of this great Kafka phrase, “There is always hope, but not for us,” and I do find myself being hopeful, even for us at some level. So I think I’m definitely writing satire, but I try not to lose track of the human beings at the center that are the facsimiles of the fiction.

When it comes to that idea of ‘hope,’ do you have thoughts on how the different generations feel right now?

I just talked to a journalism professor who said he was surprised to find a lot of his students don’t expect to go into a profession — or into that profession of journalism — as a way of making the world better. That was sort of a given for the people who went into journalism when I did, in the 1980s — that we were going into a career that would make a difference by giving people information through which they could make these reasoned decisions and make the world a better place. It seems almost Pollyanna-ish now, and partly because those daily newspaper jobs, for instance, have disappeared. But it also says something about the cynicism of a generation that takes dystopia for granted. I look at the movies that my kids watched… The Hunger Games and other movies that imagined a world beyond our control, and I completely understand the cynicism that might rise up. Yet, when I look at the world, at those people who make a difference, it often is the young idealists. 

What do you think is the role of a writer during this time?

Man, there are so many different roles, and that’s why there are so many different writers. For some novelists, their role is to show you an identity in a world that you hadn’t imagined before. For other novelists, it’s to create a dystopia, to warn you about where we might be headed. For me as a novelist, it’s always been to look out at the world as it is and find ways to capture that in fiction, both to remark on where we’re at, but also where we might be going.

The writer has so many different roles, and even as people find themselves drifting away from reading, which the statistics show us is happening, I still don’t think there’s any other artistic form that grabs you the way a book does. It’s not passive, like watching a TV show or listening to a podcast. It’s a very active kind of art that has you bring those words in and then perform them yourself, almost like music, so that it becomes a part of you, and you become part of the process of reading the book. That’s why I think it’s so great at building empathy and having us consider points of view that we wouldn’t before.

To change the subject just a bit, you’ve written in a variety of genres throughout your career. What keeps you switching things up?

I don’t tend to think of genres the way they appear in a bookstore. I think of it as this particular story I’m telling. Those stories have different requirements and different needs, and underlying everything I write is a sort of wistful sense of humor about the world and, probably, a deeply held humanism that, as people, we can always do better. So, it doesn’t matter if I’m writing a road-trip novel tinged with humor and suspense like So Far Gone, or I’m writing a deeply romantic polyphonic novel like Beautiful Ruins. I’m asking myself questions about the role the folly and foibles of humanity play, and how these people can find their way back to being better human beings.

That’s both really beautiful and also a lot of responsibility to take on.

I think the humor part tends to lessen the responsibility, because as soon as I have a self-important character, they shoot themselves in the foot, or drive their car into a building, or do something that returns them to their common humanity.… It’s both humbling and daunting to realize that a kind of philosophy is emerging from your work, because I don’t think I would have struck out on this journey with one particular philosophy. It’s just it’s kind of emerged over time.

Can you recommend either some of your favorite authors or who you’ve been reading lately?

A couple of books that I really loved this year are Virginia Evans’ novel The Correspondent, which I just thought was terrific. She’s one of those writers who had a long 20-year path to publication. I always find writers like that so incredibly inspiring. I also just read Donald Hall’s Essays After Eighty. Donald Hall is a great poet, and these essays were just so clear-eyed about aging that I thought they were terrific.

I reviewed a book for The New York Times called Buckeye by Patrick Ryan. It was one of those great, big, meaty historical novels about World War II that remind you of the joys of an old-fashioned novel.