So Far Gone, by Jess Walter

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 with like-minded loons 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.

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.

— Pat Prijatel

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, by Nikole Hannah-Jones

The 1619 Project reframes the American origin story by placing slavery at its foundation and tracing how that legacy continues to shape American institutions and society. Expanding on an earlier issue of The New York Times Magazine, the anthology combines essays, poetry, and brief historical interludes to connect the nation’s past to its present.

Across its opening chapters, the anthology argues that slavery shaped not only America’s racial hierarchy but also its democratic ideals and economic practices. The book opens with an essay that partly focuses on the 1619 arrival of a slave ship in Virginia. This arrival marks the beginning of the system of chattel slavery in America. This system would continue for some 250 years, ending in the Civil War, but whose effects would linger long beyond that.

In “Democracy,” Nikole Hannah-Jones contends that Black Americans, rather than the nation’s founders, have repeatedly compelled the United States to honor its stated principles of equality and liberty. In “Race,” Dorothy Roberts examines how racial categories prevented solidarity between white and Black workers and helped preserve slavery, while in “Sugar,” Khalil Gibran Muhammad links the harsh labor practices of American capitalism to the industrial discipline of chattel slavery.

The remaining chapters extend this analysis to politics, citizenship, self-defense, punishment, inheritance, medicine, and other areas of American life. They examine whether Black Americans’ votes are still treated as legitimate, whether the right to self-defense is applied equally, and how racial disparities persist in law enforcement and punishment. The anthology concludes with an essay advocating reparations as a means of redressing the enduring burdens imposed by centuries of slavery and racial oppression.

The 1619 Project challenges the completeness of the conventional American origin story by showing how slavery and racial oppression have shaped the nation’s current political, economic, and social institutions. Its central contribution is to connect that history to persistent inequities, asking readers to reconsider not only how the United States began but also how its founding contradictions continue to influence the present.

— Jim Lynch

Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

In the two hundred years since its publication, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein has permeated our culture. The story has been adapted for plays and films; published in many different book editions with various prefaces, introductions, end notes, illustrations, and supplemental materials. Frankenstein shows up in cartoons. Little monsters ring our doorbells at Halloween.

Yet, despite the ubiquity of the story, few of us had read it. It is a very old book which tests our patience with19th century literary conventions. It has a quaint Russian doll structure with the exotic Arabian’s story tucked inside the monster’s story, absorbed into Victor Frankenstein’s story, transcribed by the sea captain in a years-long series of letters to his sister in England. We chafed at that, and the long family lineages, paeans to nature, and over-shared emotional states. And particularly, we disliked the whining of Victor Frankenstein. Nonetheless, we persisted with our usual lively discussions.

To summarize the story: Privileged, young Victor Frankenstein, a student of natural philosophy (aka science), decides to stitch together scavenged body parts and bring them to life. And one dark and stormy night, he does. But when his creation turns out to be big and ugly and scary, Victor flees in horror, abandoning his newborn.

One of the most interesting parts of the story for several of us was the middle where the creature grows up, as it were, becoming aware of his senses, learning how to find nourishment and moving through the world, discerning right from wrong. By his intimate observation of neighbors he watches from his hovel, he learns about family. During his time of watching and secretly helping them with their chores, he hears the tale of the beautiful Arabian woman, and he learns about romantic love. When he needs a broader understanding of Western history and the circumstances of his own origins, he happens upon books and letters in satchels and pockets. He is kind and intuitive. And very, very lonely.

Plan A to solve his loneliness is to become so kind and cultured he will be warmly welcomed in society despite his physical grotesqueness. But those hopes are dashed when he gets beaten and chased away by the people in the cottage he has been secretly observing and looks on as his friends.

Plan B is to obtain a mate like himself that they may live in isolation together. Knowing, by this time, how he came to be and who gave him life, he finds Victor Frankenstein and makes his request. Frankenstein waffles, saying no, then yes, then no again. The creature becomes so angry and frustrated, he lashes out and begins to murder people dear to Victor.

By the end, Frankenstein, having searched the Alps for his creation that he may kill it, dies after telling the whole misadventure, from beginning to the end, to a ship’s captain, Robert Walton, who is aspiring to reach the North Pole. Shortly after Victor dies, the creature finds his creator’s body on the ship and asks forgiveness for killing people whom Frankenstein loved, but still he presses his case: (addressing the captain)

You, who call Frankenstein your friend, seem to have a knowledge of my crimes and his misfortunes. But in the detail which he gave you of them, he could not sum up the hours and months of misery which I endured, wasting in impotent passions. For whilst I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires. They were forever ardent and craving; still I desired love and friendship, and I was still spurned. Was there no injustice in this? Am I to be considered the only criminal, when all human kind sinned against me . . . Why do you not execrate the rustic who sought to destroy the saviour of his child? Nay, these are virtuous and immaculate beings! I the miserable and abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on. Even now my blood boils at the recollection of this injustice.

After his rant, he announces his intention to go into the icy climes and build his own funeral pyre.

I shall ascend my funeral pyre triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames . . . My spirit will sleep in peace; or, if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.

And he leaps out the cabin window onto an ice raft and drifts into darkness.

Mary Shelley gives her creature an anti-heroic/Miltonic/Shakespearian grand exit, but she lets Victor Frankenstein just fade away. So where do the author’s sympathies lie? Who is the monster? What are the responsibilities of creation? What happens when we’re not loved? What are the perils of loving? Of loneliness? Why do we seem cursed to judge by appearances?

During our final week of discussing Frankenstein, we had the perk of hosting a local author who has done primary-source research on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. We came to understand more fully the abandonment issues which Mary, left motherless after only a few days, likely felt. She spent her young years living in acrimony with her stepmother until she was banished to Scotland by her father, so she likely had more than one critical feeling about the familial creator who abandoned his inherently good and hopeful child. Yet according to her diaries, she thrived with the Baxter family in Scotland, riding, reading, and soaking up lots of scary Scottish lore. There she met Percy Shelley and began an affair with him. While traveling with him and a friend in Switzerland, during a confining day of bad weather, they each committed to write a story founded on some supernatural occurrence. As she brags in the preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, she was the only one to complete the challenge.

And thus the science fiction genre was born.

We spent four weeks on this slender volume, finding much to learn and discuss: the differences between the original 1818 edition and the revised 1831 edition, the literary conventions of 19th century novels, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s famous but absent feminist mother, the abandonment by her father, the grief from the loss of three children, the perpetual drama of a vagabond life with Percy Shelley and her dedication to transcribing his poetry after his death. Plus, the specter of genteel poverty always hovering while she raised her only surviving child, a son, and wrote six more novels. All this in a time when women were vulnerable in so many ways.

A life bravely lived life, Mary Shelley. R.I.P.

— Sharelle Moranville