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A Worthy Novel About These Times™
Jess Walter’s So Far Gone is a madcap road novel that aptly captures the absurdity of the past ten years.
In his years as a reporter, Kinnick observed as conspiracy theories went from being the domain of loggers who thought forests were full of fake-tree surveillance devices to representing a dominant current in electoral politics. The through-line uniting these disparate books is a cynical, absurdist sense of humor lined with a cautious humanism — reading his work, it comes as no surprise that Walter once pretended to write for Esquire when he was 20 years old in order to land an interview with Kurt Vonnegut Jr. While the book’s central act of violence might bring some of its characters closer together to heal in its aftermath, it also results in a surge of support for the fringe group that’s responsible for it, with people writing “from all over the country” to express their interest.
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