Who doesn’t like a good story? If we were lucky, our parents read to us when we were young, and we grew up enchanted by the world of imagination and its creatures. This experience demonstrated to us the power of ideas, and the extension of ourselves in the characters we love and hate. Before we assume the burdens of adult roles, we can invent our own stories, fill them with heroes and villains, and embark upon adventures.
Even as grown-ups we crave stories. Newspapers provide not facts, but stories. Friends tell us their stories of their marriages, careers, travels, and battles. Listening to those stories enfolds our imaginative selves into the other person’s life, letting us see the world through their eyes. As such, this empathetic state strengthens the social bonds that draws people together in times of need.
Stories may teach the reader certain truths, but they do so in a respectful and circumspect manner. They do not preach to us but let us draw our own conclusions from the outcome, and reinforce the message not with threats but with deeply felt emotions. They are an older and more powerful form of social discourse and nurture than deities or doctrines.
In our times of tribulation, suffering as we are from inhuman forces deployed for the sake of power and wealth, we can turn to stories not only for comfort, but for contemplation. The characters may work through problems that we ourselves encounter, and emerge either successful or defeated. By following their feelings and decisions, we try out those same scenarios in our own situation, as a simulation removed from our actual circumstances.
When a society encounters sweeping conundrums that defy conventional solutions, people may act irrationally and tilt social norms even further from the stable axis, causing dangerous and more dramatic gyrations that threaten the very structure of society. This is when stories can help restore the center, as they reveal the relationships and mechanisms of power and influence, giving the individual time to think and return to rationality. We can contemplate the ultimate consequences of our collective actions, and perhaps avert disaster when the collective veers off the path of sanity.
If civilization does collapse and humanity destroys itself, it will be ironic that we began by telling stories, and finished the story of humanity with more stories. We can look at it more optimistically if we realize that telling stories helped birth civilization, and may also aid in its rebirth. The stakes could not be higher. Listen well, my children, for I have a story to tell.
Jess Walter’s story about a retired newspaper reporter / aspiring writer who gets yanked out of his remote and somewhat primitive living situation leaves this reader with a sense of uneasiness. The book reveals multiple levels of emotional and intellectual dysfunction, in both individuals and society, and has no satisfying solution.
The story ripples outward into society at large, calling into question many of our cherished institutions and beliefs, such as work, family, religion, and altruistic aid for each other. Character arcs suggest not only individual transformation, but the shifting ground under which characters build the foundations of their lives.
This story may illustrate the original meaning of the phrase coined by a statistician: ”regression to the mean.” Originally proposed to derogate the mundane, regression literally meant to revert to some previous state. Given the predominant belief back then in the continual perfection of species through evolution, reversion meant going backwards to a less perfect state. Outliers on the positive tail, i.e. those taller, healthier and smarter, would inevitably produce offspring less tall, healthy, or smart.
We now realize that this effect, regression to the mean, does not exhibit some nefarious natural law, but is merely an artifact of selection effects. Indeed, the term’s precise meaning refers only to a mathematical technique of fitting a linear relationship to a group of points by minimizing their collective distance from that regression line. However, the term still carries its derogatory connotations for the popular mind.
Given the current belief that society is not progressing, but in fact degrading, regression takes on a different meaning. Going back suggests returning to a purified state, unadulterated by modern consumerism, commercialism, and power politics. The hero of Jess Walter’s story undertakes such a task, retreating from a crazy world into the sanity and peace of the wilderness north of Spokane, Washington.
The popular and lay use of that well worn statistical phenomenon can reassure the reader that society is self-correcting, and that extremes will be punished and herded back into the mass, the ’one sigma” group that makes up the bulk of the bell curve. That comfort rests upon the belief in inexorable progress, a concept we now find difficult to accept.
If society is indeed degrading and evolution knows nothing of perfection but is merely an ad hoc conglomeration of whatever works, this tendency to lop off outliers takes on an new dimension. No longer just a ”one step back, two steps forward” dance with random chance, this effect may actually reinforce the decline, and hasten the nose dive.
It also illustrates a system resistant to change. While that may be fine for benign and stable civilizations, when they become self destructive and begin to undermine their own foundations, carrying on as usual does not offer much comfort. This theme runs through Jess Walter’s novel.
Perhaps the novel leaves me dissatisfied because of my identification with the protagonist, who has dropped out of the craziness to retreat to an heirloom property in the woods. Although he is initially ill equipped to meet challenges of marauding raccoons and the prospect of generating his own electrical power, he does procure the minimal amount of technology to survive, namely an air-powered pellet gun for the critters and solar panels for the juice.
Other attempts to adapt are not so logical or successful. He still relies on purchased groceries, snack food, canned goods, and other highly processed food. He mentions refrigeration and its demands upon a solar power system, which suggests that he hasn’t fully adapted to living off the grid. He tries to build a composting system for his human waste, but still relies on an outhouse pit toilet. These tactics reflect a character, and perhaps the author, who still struggles to create a coherent and self-sustaining lifestyle without standard fixtures of modern society.
These attempts, haphazard and incomplete, coincide with most peoples’ understanding of what lies in store for someone who rejects modern norms. The picture looks primitive and bleak. No showers means a smelly body. Old cars mean breakdowns and inconvenience. Lack of a telephone means not knowing when someone significant in your life dies. Never having company makes you suspicious of anyone who drops by.
No doubt most readers would recoil from those deficiencies. Maybe the author deliberately made the wilderness experience disagreeable to confirm the bias of the masses, or maybe he is trashing the ideal stereotype started by Thoreau. The author doesn’t recognize his character’s or his own ignorance, though. It is likely that Jess Walter has never tried living off the grid for an extended period of time. When you do, as I have done, you find ways to cope that require little input to the system and run efficiently. This takes time, but the grandfather has been at it for seven years, and should have it figured out by now.
Maybe Jess Walter didn’t want to make his character’s lifestyle sound too good, because his ultimate return to society would remake the story into a tragedy, and might leave the mainstream reader uneasy and disgusted. They will never abandon their refrigerators and air conditioners, after all. Why make them uncomfortable? That won’t sell books. After all, isn’t the old man’s failure inevitable? He failed as a husband, father, and career journalist, didn’t he? Make him fail as a homesteader, too.
His grandchildren force this older man back into the crazy mainstream. They appear unannounced and unexpectedly on his doorstep, delivered by a stranger. These children are themselves victims of family dysfunction, and they carry their disease with them. They involve their grandfather in their parents’ hyper-religious dystopia filled with guns and violence, destroying not only his peaceful existence, but his facial bone structure as well.
This bizarre situation becomes even more convoluted with feelings of guilt and rejection, both on his part and that of his daughter, the absent mom who shunted her children off to the wilderness while she took a time out. Has the grandfather shirked on his responsibility to look out for his daughter and her offspring? Was it his fault that he could not follow them down the rabbit hole of militant apocalyptic Christianity? That seems to be his conclusion, and that of his daughter as well, but the book doesn’t make it that easy. Those guys with the automatic rifles are clearly nut jobs, and the kids’ father hates not only his father-in-law and women’s lib but liberal democracy.
His daughter’s rebellious teenage years, complete with truancy, drug use, and rock music, have mellowed somewhat, but it is a stretch to see her as a mature adult. She depends upon a therapist to make sense of her chaotic life, ultimately blaming her father, a convenient scapegoat, since her mother recently achieved sainthood after her untimely death from cancer. Of course it was her father’s fault that her parents divorced. Didn’t she catch him with his girlfriend one day when she was skipping class, which we learn, by the way, was what saved her from losing her virginity to a horny teenager who had some particularly good weed?
We see the world through her twisted logic as she attends a drugged out rock festival with a former lover, the father of her first child, unmarried of course, but that’s cool. This is her time out that starts the whole SNAFU with a not-so-cool ending, complete with horrific violence and abuse, where the victims are the ones trying to help out. We begin to sympathize with the grandfather’s ex-girlfriend who selfishly wants to distance herself from the whole mess, but winds up getting involved tertially by calling on her ex-cop boyfriend, who by the way winds up in the hospital with a bullet wound.
Even the most stable couple, the grandfather’s backwoods friends of Native American connection, are punished for their efforts to help, first with the woman’s worry when the thirteen year-old granddaughter runs off with her nineteen year-old boyfriend while supposedly being her responsibility, and secondly when the man has to use his hunting rifle in a firefight and almost kills someone, albeit the villain. Nobody escapes unscathed from this fiasco.
Through contrasting the uneventful and innocent life of the grandfather in his wilderness hovel with the twisted, dysfunctional, duplicitous, conspiratorial, and culpable lives of the rest of mainstream society, Jess Walter comments upon what people consider normal today. He pulls no punches, showing every occupant of this brave new world in various states of confusion, conflict, and despair. Seeing this bizarre world through the eyes of a child, he has the young grandson asking questions like ”What is a bi?” The grandfather, sharing the boy’s innocence, asks a similar question at the rock festival: ”What is a boof?” Both questions involve answers that beg more questions. ”Why shouldn’t we like both boys and girls?” ”You blow what up where to get high?”
To someone outside the norm neither the questions nor the answers make sense. For those in the mainstream, the questions and answers are invisible, taken for granted, part of everyday existence. They are social norms adopted and enforced by the masses. As the majority engage in more unusual behavior, the mean shifts and these behaviors become acceptable, even if they are on the margins of polite society.
This differs from regression to the mean, because overwhelming forces have propelled the majority into new statistical territory. This is the space occupied by failed states, fascist regimes, predatory economics, and any other cannibalistic structures that feed upon the weak and ignorant. The system has lost its ability to self-correct, and gyrates in ever wider and more eccentric orbits, until it flies apart with the induced stress.
Jess Walter doesn’t quite go this far, although as his novel’s title suggests, we may be so far gone that there is no going back. Maybe that is why the old man must give up his ideal of living quietly and repairing the damage to the landscape wrought by his ancestors. That apparently is not a solution because we have gone past the point of no return. People cannot survive that way any more, at least en masse. Perhaps a few can escape, but are they abandoning those they love for selfish reasons?
We may condemn extremist groups that predict the apocalypse and arm themselves for end times, but are these people just crazy or is something deeper at work? Why would people buy expensive automatic weapons and pickup trucks just to swap stories or act out conspiracies? If they aren’t thoughtful enough to see through the contradictions, what motivates them to sacrifice themselves to such a harsh master?
They may be acting out an ancient behavior, where they believe they are enforcing social norms to save society. We have seen numerous examples of this role and its grisly effects throughout history, with witch trials, anti-American committees, and ethnic persecution. These people err on the side of caring too much, and lose their humanity in the process. Yet this behavior persists, even when the perpetrators suffer along with their victims.
These sometimes suicidal warriors punish anyone who violates the social contract. Slackers do not eat, or get pushed out into the cold. Thieves lose their hands or eyes. Unbelievers must be either enlightened or killed, committing their souls to God for judgment. They appoint themselves as the guardians of civilization, while at the same time destroying other cultures or practices that they find alien or threatening.
We do hold the gun-toting true believers accountable in the novel, and recognize the paranoia and absurdity of the son-in-law’s complex web of nefarious deeds and entities wrapped up in the ”deep state”. The pastor comes off with a somewhat more coherent belief, but still is so far gone to be impossible to convert back to pacifism and universal love. The pastor’s son and the granddaughter somehow see through the fog of their parents’ belief systems, and may piece together something more appropriate for themselves, that is if they can see through their own assumptions.
Evidently, both the grandfather and the pseudo-soldiers are too far from the mainstream to be tolerated. Neither extreme can persist. The grandfather must return to the mainstream if he is to be a part of his daughter’s and grandchildren’s lives. The violent avengers of immorality must be tried and jailed, as they are clearly a threat even to the faithful. There is a reason why people have cars and cell phones, and a reason why the government holds a monopoly on killing.
Just as we cannot go back to pre-industrial ways of life, we cannot return to prehistoric methods of social control. We invented the judicial system to bypass the bias and delusions of ordinary people acting as judge, jury, and executioner. We built multi-level government to organize behavior in logical and harmonious ways. We rely on those systems for our very existence. When they fail, everyone suffers.
Jess Walter may be showing us that our state is in danger today, not from just extremists, but from illogical and contradictory drifts in social norms. Without the capacity to curate, moderate, and authenticate ideas, we have become prey to every crazy conspiracy theory and blatantly false assertion that has a shiny wrapping or can excite boosts from eager victims. This social pandemic attacks the fabric of modern civilization, undermining the power of government and the rule of law. No wonder the book ends with a somewhat dissatisfying conclusion. How can we feel good about the way things are, when nobody has any idea how to fix it?
After spending seven years in the woods and reading over nine hundred books, when his newspaper editor friend and ex-lover asks the old man what he has learned, he gropes through his mind for an answer: Water. Seriously? Come on, Zarathustra, give me a better answer. You must have accomplished something after all that reading and thinking.
Of course he has. His answer returns our attention back to the substance that is the foundation of all life. It does not, however, address her problems of slacker reporters or shrinking readership for her paper. Her disappointment and scorn suggests the typical attitude toward those who opt out of society: that they are fleeing the problem, not actively trying to solve it. The ones who stay in the trenches and slug it out day to day are the real heroes, right? Maybe, if you believe in trench warfare. If not, not so much.
Asking such a question in the first place reveals a fundamental difference in approach. Those who would not take the time to read nine hundred books just want a simple answer. Those who would take the time to read all those books just want to read. They may or may not be looking for something. The process of reading and thinking is its own reward.
Did all those years and books leave their mark on the grandfather? Perhaps, as he does come across as a literate person. He shares a keen interest in all things with his granddaughter, who resembles his daughter at that age, but that innate quality may have been a cause of his reading and thinking rather than an effect of it. Still, we sense a subtle difference in him, perhaps in the longevity of his curiosity and child-like fascination with the world.
Other characters in the story have lost this quality, having entered the adult world with all its concerns and conditions, of work, family, home, and wealth accumulation. His daughter, the mother of his two grandchildren, attempts to recapture that teenage sense of freedom and innocence when she elopes with her first love to the rock concert, but recoils from the rampant drug use she finds there and winds up shivering in her tent from panic attacks, worrying about her children.
Try as they might, nobody has a foolproof plan, and every action leads to new complications. Neither retreat or digging in appear to be the path to salvation. Attack only leads to bloodshed and more suffering. How can we have gone so far astray? How do we find our way back to firmer ground?
What some might call a second childhood, returning to the wilderness and erasing all traces of his family’s existence on the ground, could have marked a transition into something beyond adulthood, a sort of super-maturity. This seemed more pregnant with meaning than herding clueless golfers around the course, even if he would be ultimately unsuccessful. Instead you might interpret his choice to reenter society as arrested development.
Life rolls on relentlessly, and will leave us behind if we don’t run to keep up. At least that is what Jess Walter seems to imply with the old man’s decision to buy a cell phone and a better car. How else can he catch his grandchildren in their chess tournaments and teenage carnival? He also has to rent a decent apartment so as to provide appropriate accommodations for his grandchildren when his daughter wants him to babysit. Oh, and he needs a job to pay for those new expenses, but there is no meaningful employment left, so he must shepherd golfers around the course.
At least he’s doing something, right? That’s got to be better than reading books, writing, walking in the woods, designing solar power and composting systems, regenerating the land, and just sometimes sitting and doing nothing. Right? Does that conclusion bother you as much as it does me?
For those firmly embedded in the modern paradigm, what seems familiar seems preferable, even if it is inferior. They would rather see the old man plod along in his family’s footsteps than see him striking out in untrammeled wilderness. They can keep an eye on him that way, call the ambulance when he keels over, stick him in a nursing home when he becomes too decrepit.
The wilderness property can reenter the marketplace and fulfill its commodity role. The new owners will doubtless tear down the cabin and build a big vacation home, have power brought in, dig a septic system and drill a well, and upgrade the road. Progress! Lots of money changing hands and resources being consumed. Just what the economy needs.
Some would say this represents the future, while the old man’s dream of living off the grid, returning the land to its original state, reading books, contemplating life, and writing his thoughts represents the past. Of course this relies on the myth of infinite growth, the lie upon which capitalism depends to fool all of us into its twisted logic.
If you don’t believe the myth and chart a different trajectory for civilization, you may interpret the ending of the story differently. Jess Walter certainly doesn’t portray our current predicament optimistically. Nor does he prophecy doom. He seems to invite the readers to make up their own minds.
Does the author deliberately toss off the ending as if it was a foregone conclusion, with no emotional investment, just a bald statement of ”this is what happened...” to provide some critical distance from the situation? Does this free the reader to evaluate the outcome rationally, as well as emotionally? Is he telling us that nothing is pure, that everything involves compromise, and that any course of action involves sacrifice?
In the stillness of the blank page following the last sentence, do we question our headlong rush to a troubled future? Could we look upon the deserted highways of the Covid19 lockdown in a different light, one of stillness and poise, with humans standing like trees, soaking up the sunlight? Could we watch the eons pass with equanimity? Is that a responsible strategy when all other courses of action seem to lead to destruction?
If indeed we are approaching the end times, as the militant Christian pastor believed, do we arm ourselves for Armageddon, dig in and recruit for the final battle, content that we will be saved in the rapture, or do we stop, stick our heads above the ramparts, and reconnoiter?
It wasn’t our ability to run fast and climb trees that preserved humanity and allowed them to prosper. It was instead the abnormally large brain, devoted to sensing the environment and planning strategies for survival that made the difference. Was that the old man’s role, sitting alone in his wilderness cabin? Was that so pointless? Was his newspaper editor’s question: ”What have you learned?” ignorant or prophetic? Did she expect a serious answer to such an bald faced question, or did she accurately grasp the depth of our predicament and extend her hope towards this man?
It seems like Jess Walter was unable to reach this climactic height, either in his own mind, or in the mind of his character. He has his yogi, his seeker, reply with a cryptic ”Water is important” and the impotent admission of defeat ”I tried.” Seven years of solitude did not lead to a revelation. Civilization conspired to pull him back into the mainstream, to ”regress him to the mean.”
Are we to interpret his efforts as futile? The character does seem somewhat noble, and his efforts were somewhat successful. What Jess Walter seems to say is that individual effort isn’t enough, especially when society attacks individuals who attempt to opt out. Although he doesn’t hold out any individuals or groups as messianic, perhaps the author intends us to view the solution on a wider plane.
If society actively supported original thinkers, encouraging them to look critically at social norms, took alternative lifestyles under serious consideration, and chose the best elements of many approaches, it might arrive at an eclectic answer composed of many facets, an amalgam of many minds. That might mirror the time-tested methods of evolution. It might add weight to the outliers and push the mean of the distribution in a new direction.
Perhaps the end is nigh, but a new world awaits beyond the horizon. Humanity created this current world. Could we not create a different one, based upon the example of trees, where balance and longevity coexist in a stable ecosystem? If trees once saved us from predators, perhaps we can save us from ourselves by taking on properties of trees. Is not death inevitable, with hope invested in future generations? That at least seems firmly established at the end of Jess Walter’s book.
If I were to extend this novel to my own liking, I would have the old man impart his knowledge to his granddaughter, so that her piercing intellect may articulate what he discovered. Indeed Jess Walter hints at such a possibility. He may then leave us with hope, not in divine intervention, but in transcendence.
Perhaps the grandfather was wise to return from the wilderness, like a shaman returning from the nether world with healing knowledge, or like a modern day Zarathustra. He will not found his own religion, God forbid. Instead many legions of seers may emerge and each make their own small contribution.
You may have heard the phrase ”tipping point” used to reference situations where something passes a point where stability is lost and a system changes rapidly until it finds a new equilibrium, or final resting place. This implies that there is no going back, or at least it would take a titanic amount of energy to reverse the processes set in motion. There is no way but forward, into an unknown and unstable future.
Jess Walter suggests this very state with the title of his novel, and no doubt invites the reader to determine whether So Far translates to Too Far. Of course he doesn’t explicitly state what is close to or beyond the tipping point, but the implications are pretty clear.
Probably the most succinct statement of the dire state of the world comes from the grandfather’s musings about overtly corrupt and incompetent politicians, blatant untruths swallowed whole by masses of people, senseless violence perpetrated against strangers as performance art, and of course his own profession’s hunger for all the gory details that they will amplify to maximum effect. We can argue with none of what he believes, and accept his decision to escape all the madness, even if we would not choose that for ourselves.
The novel portrays that decision not as a heroic crusade for truth and righteousness, but as a retreat from a battle lost. Ironically, the militant religious sect that appears to be actively training for the last great battle do more harm than good. They are the ones guilty of violent crimes, unable to control the fear and loathing that is their stock in trade.
Fighting invariably leads to anger and injury. Clearly the violence and abuse of power that led us to this crisis will only push us over the cliff, a juggernaut out of control. Yet impotence doesn’t seem like a noble response. The grandfather cannot just mutely allow his grandchildren to be kidnapped, partially due to his own animosity towards his son in-law.
The resulting chain of deeds and misdeeds craft a good story, but one with a bitter aftertaste. All is not right with the world. None of the big problems have been solved. Not even the little problems go away. The situation just morphs into a different form, perhaps somewhat less dysfunctional, but by no means resolved. There are no assurances of a happily ever after, and in fact indications that the wrongdoers may escape punishment, and confusion will plague even the next generation.
While Jess Walter does not go so far as to predict the destruction of civilization, the ”End Times” of the paranoid pastor, he does not offer much in the way of hope. Are we to interpret the granddaughter’s loss of religious faith as a positive sign? The situation seems ambiguous, subject to further development. Will she be crushed by a chimeric first love? We don’t know, and neither does her boyfriend.
The grandfather’s return to society seems more like abandonment of his higher ideals than a noble self-sacrificing bid to help raise the grandchildren. His role is limited in that sphere, his daughter still fiercely resentful of interference, while condemning him of neglect. Without her therapist, she must slowly work through her own ghosts and neuroses from the past.
We must make do with what is left once the dust settles. What can we salvage from the collapse of the family structure? What opportunities exist for a retired journalist, refugee from a dying trade? What possibilities for love may be found in the same old junk drawers? Where do we even begin to look for new drawers to search?
Neither Jess Walter nor his characters know the answer. Perhaps there is no answer, no way to right the leaning tower, nothing any of us can do. Maybe we just put up with the incessant pollution our cell phones feed us, trying to mask the smell and taste with cute cat videos. Take the bad with the trivial. The problem is, this is no spoonful of sugar, and it doesn’t help the poison go down.
Ultimately, how can a thinking person survive such a predicament? This is the new evolutionary challenge of our species. Maybe those on the tails of the probability curve will drop off the edge of the world. Maybe they will get pulled back into the one-sigma group, lobotomized for their own good. Either way, it doesn’t seem very hopeful.
Of course, that depends upon your own belief system. Maybe you regard everything that is happening as merely cyclical, repeated endlessly through time, in each era decried by prophets to be the end of the world. Maybe you are right, and can sleep at night knowing that even though it appears to be out of control, it has all happened before and will no doubt happen again. While that fatalist outlook may offer comfort, it is no better than any other popular philosophy. If it makes you feel better, do it.
Whatever scenario you choose, it will not be pretty. Perhaps, more than anything, that justifies the uncomfortable and dissatisfying conclusion to So Far Gone.