Responsibility
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.
New Normal
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?