Into the brittle and bizarre landscape of contemporary American discourse, where families splinter along ideological lines and conspiracy theories metastasize through digital echo chambers, rides Jess Walter, perhaps just in time. If ever a combination of empathy and an eye for honest detail is needed, it’s now. That one-two punch is delightfully on display in his latest work, So Far Gone, a road-trip novel about a family, broken across three generations, trying to put itself back together again as they careen around the Pacific Northwest. It’s a place where cities (and their wobbly institutions such as newspapers—a particular love of Walter’s as an ex-newsman) serve as conservative punchlines while the backroads lead past hidden redoubts of white Christian nationalists.
A lifetime resident of Spokane, Walter knows this territory well, but he may be most loved by readers and fans—his June 23 event at Powell’s City of Books in Portland was standing room only—for his wistful optimism and tough love for, well, everything, from his characters to wannabe young fiction writers bellyaching about their fate.
What are you doing here with this book? It’s not exactly satire.
If I'm a satirist, I'm probably the warmest satirist you've ever met. It's hard for me to not care about the characters and have them just go through the motions to make some political point. I think for years I assumed I had to be a little darker and more cynical than I really am. I've always been gregarious and drawn to people. The joy in doing this is creating characters nothing like you on the surface and then finding your way in to qualities that are profoundly human, and that you recognize in yourself.
Where does your empathy for characters come from?
My mom was an incredibly empathetic person. I was depressed and lonely after losing my vision in one eye as a kid. She would sit down with my yearbook and point out the girls with glasses that she thought I should ask out on dates, and the kids that she thought looked like they might not have friends, like me. We took in foster kids because she just thought we had more than we needed. My dad, on the other hand, was a stoic and had no patience for self-pity. Those two examples—my dad's demand that we not feel sorry for ourselves and my mom's incredible empathy—are like the north and south pole of my ethics and morality.
You started off as a reporter and your old employer, Spokane’s daily paper, the Spokesman-Review, figures in this story. How has your journalism background shaped your fiction?
I don’t have an MFA, though I now visit various writing programs to teach. The newsroom was my education and more. I think I have a writing style that is descriptive but doesn't get bogged down, and that's partly from journalism. The joke with this book, where I was trying to write something so topical, is that I acted almost like a spot news novelist—out in the world scribbling in my notebook and then racing back to the office to file.
You've resisted categorization throughout your career, moving between genres. How have you managed to maintain that freedom?
You know, as soon as any label lands on me, I immediately want to wriggle out from under it. My path to being a writer was so haphazard and piecemeal—I had to teach myself how to do everything. So once I learned one thing, I wanted to learn something else. My aspirations were always to be a literary novelist who crossed boundaries. My first love was Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote science fiction in an incredibly humanist way, with these postmodernist metafictional moments where he would just burst in. I love how Joan Didion went from essays to fiction and back. The freedom to write something different seems like the most basic part of creativity. It is a rejection of the way the publishing industry pushes you to repeat what was successful, but so far, I've been able to venture out and just write the next book I want to read, which seems to me like the only way to approach writing.
Care to wade in to the issue of young white male writers complaining about being shut out of publishing?
You know, it's always been hard for anyone to get published. It was hard for me to write literary fiction and get reviewed without having gone to the right schools. There's a student I know whose jam is Raymond Carver and Dennis Johnson. He's says, "No one's publishing that stuff anymore." I'd tell him, “So is that your obstacle or your opportunity? Maybe what the world needs now is a great new Carver-style collection!” The tides shift in publishing. Too many writers stay on the shore thinking, “It's too far in or too far out.” Just go swim.
Watch the full interview here. (Video: Alan Zhou)
