GETAWAYS

Adventure in unlikely places.

- TAYLOR ANTRIM

There are too few novels that turn our current political climate into comedy. Jess Walter's So Far Gone (Harper) is an amusing counterexample: the story of the charming, curmudgeonly Rhys Kinnick, who responds to the increasingly MAGA leanings of his son-in-law by removing himself from society and resolving to live, Thoreau-like, in the cinder-block house in rural Washington that once belonged to Rhys's grandfather. The plan goes awry when his two grandchildren show up, unannounced, on his doorstep, ferried there by a neighbor. The children's mother has disappeared, and the novel becomes a romp through various political subcultures, peppered with lovable hard-boiled characters, as Rhys attempts to find her. So Far Gone feels like a 21st-century variation on classics of detective fiction and entirely original at the same time.

In 2022, Honor Jones wrote a personal essay for The Atlantic that went quickly viral. Parenting had not robbed her of her inner spark, she wrote, but rather showed her an entirely new constellation of joy that also awakened her to the dearth of it in her marriage.