Protagonist Rhys Kinnick is like many contemporary journalists—unemployed, cynical, and hyper-aware of the chaos of the world. Once a respected environmental investigative reporter, he’s one of the many victims of mass layoffs throughout the media and, in his 50s, has no remotely similar prospects. Add to this a strained relationship with his beloved daughter Bethany, a son-in law who has become a Christian nationalist, a failed romantic entanglement, and the fallout from the 2016 election, and Rhys faces a crisis of sanity. “I felt like the world was drifting in one direction and I was going the other way,” he says.
The final straw is a disastrous Thanksgiving dinner conversation with his son-in-law Shane, in which both men are absolutely right, and Rhys unravels. He drives to his family’s 40-acre sheep farm outside of Spokane, on which sheep likely have never set a hoof, throws his cell phone (“a $600 Pop-Tart of modern science”) out the window, and becomes as close to a hermit as he can manage. For seven years, he lives off the grid, filling his small cabin with hundreds of books and thousands of pages of his own writing. Outside, he begins destroying outbuildings in an attempt to gradually eliminate all signs of his existence.
Rhys is not a man for subtlety.
When his two delightful grandchildren show up at his front porch, he doesn’t recognize them at first. Leah, 13, and Asher, 6, are delivered to him by one of their neighbors after Bethany has disappeared. Asher, with his grandfather’s sense of drama, suggests perhaps his father has killed his mother. Nobody believes him, nor should they. Meanwhile, Shane is off being masculine and godly in the woods at the Church of the Blessed Fire.
All this aside, Asher needs to get to a chess tournament that night because he says he is a prodigy. This is also not true. But the kid loves chess, and Rhys, with a renewed sense of grandfatherly connection, rises to the occasion.
But first, he needs a shower and a haircut because his cabin has only the most basic indoor plumbing. (He will need at least a second shower, plus new clothes, to be minimally fit for civilization.) His friend Joanie will do the cut, but only after her common-law husband Brian scuffles with Rhys in the driveway over a slight miscommunication over Rhys’s affection for Joanie. Such is Rhys’s life.
Once somewhat clean and coiffed, he and Leah and Asher head to the Episcopal church for the tournament. But Bethany got the night wrong and there’s no tournament, only Army of our Lord (AOL) thugs waiting for them. Rhys ends up with a fractured zygomatic arch from the butt of a gun. The kids get taken to the Rampart, the cult’s compound and, from there, the caper is on. Rhys eventually rescues the kids and Bethany—or, more accurately, they rescue one another.
The characters in this book are beautifully drawn. Rhys is a multidimensional creature you have to love, while you’re questioning his good sense. Asher lives in his imagination, where he is a soldier leaping a mighty river, while awaiting his chess destiny. He’s disarmingly curious and thrilled when he meets real-life “Indians” in Brian and Joanie. Leah has her grandfather’s affinity for words—she describes his dirty beige shirt as being the color or “twice-plowed snow” and his hair like “hash browns and country gravy.” Bethany thinks her dad is disappointed in her, and Rhys is sure he’s the disappointment. Shane is a good father and husband, but fearful for the safety of his family and naïve enough to be susceptible to the lure of a cult.
Rhys faces the aftermath of his own journalistic prowess when the violent man he dubbed the Dominion Eagle Killer in multiple investigative reports ends up a member of AOL, and is especially embittered toward Rhys, who he feels was instrumental in sending him to prison.
Author Jess Walter writes with wit and energy that propels the story forward with an ironic momentum. And his paragraphs can pack a punch:
As a journalist. As an American, as a rationalist, Kinnick had come to terms with the fact that 20 percent of his countrymen were greedy assholes. But then in 2016, the greedy assholes joined with the idiot assholes and the paranoid assholes in what turned out to be an unbeatable constituency. Kinnick realizing that the asshole ceiling was much higher than he’d thought, perhaps half the country. Whatever the number, it was more than he could bear. Especially when they were in his own family.
Walter finds a messy resolution to this chaos, with an explicitly violent passage at the end. Was the violence necessary? It was jarring, and the reality is, we have discovered that some people are so far gone we cannot reason with them.
But who is so far gone here? Rhys? Shane? The Dominion Eagle Killer? The country? Walter seems to say it’s all the above.
Relationships Essential Reads
Celia, Rhys’s former wife, dies before the novel begins, but remains a voice of familial love and commitment throughout the book. It’s partially through her spirit that Bethany finally welcomes Rhys back home, each a little less disappointed in the other. As for the rest of the world? Well, that’s still a bit of a mess