So Far Gone
We saw The Head and the Heart last week. (Awesome show!) They didn’t play one of my favorites, and I can see it being a bit maudlin for a concert at an outdoor amphitheater anyway. It’s called “One Big Mystery” and is marked with “life’s one big mystery” as a repeated line. Simple stuff, but a true statement nonetheless.
The melody kept jangling in my head while reading So Far Gone by Jess Walter mostly, I think, because this novel — set in 2023, but using a post-2016-election family falling-out as a plot pin — superficially relies on tropes. Yet it’s intentional and humorous (a stereotypical sheriff named Glen Campbell, very on-point militia church verbiage [not speaking from experience!], a Thoreau-esque recluse), and it makes for an entertaining read. How easy to bill these people as non-mysterious. Yet, still, Walter does not pull out a feeble, sitcom-esque “Surprise! None of us are one-dimensional people after all!” trick. (Too easy, too cringey.)
Instead, I got caught up in something non-rhinestone-cowboy Sheriff Glen Campbell says: “So, if you want me to be even clearer about it, I will just say that these ‘nutjobs’ are a powerful constituency in this country. Which, if I may be blunt, you and Broken Cheekbones here are not.” We think of politicians and their constituents, but what about the people we regular folks find ourselves beholden to? Family? Old friends for whom we feel a sense of duty or obligation? People from our “tribe” (whether this is literal or used in a colloquial way)? Children who break from parental expectations? Can we view this collection of randos as part of our own constituency as well? In an ideal world, we’re all one big happy constituency, but it’s an interesting thought experiment to see how far we might serve our constituency before we cave. I think that’s perhaps the mystery in it all — not that we’re all shaped by our own environments and traumas and experiences, but that we might have to accommodate or acknowledge others amidst all that.
{PS: I grew up on the other side of the state from where a lot of So Far Gone takes place, but I swear I could just smell the moss and damp soil as I read. Here’s a great PNW novel.}
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