There have been a couple occasions over the last 20+ years where I have simply stopped reading books. It was usually because I had started and not finished too many sub-par books in a row. No matter the cause, I would just stop reading books, and find other things to fill my spare time with.
Two of those fallow periods were ended by picking up a single book that would reignite my love of reading. The first, in like 2004 or so, was Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. The second, in 2013, was Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter.
I remember reading the latter out on the back patio in the sunshine and thinking: I love this book so much, this is everything I need right now, I am so happy I started this book.
The novel, truly, is a miracle of literary fiction. It is a remarkable book. One of my all time favorites. It brought me out of a real funk and I haven’t gone through a period without reading since.
Over the last 10 years or so, I have read most Jess Walter novels, those published before Beautiful Ruins and those published after. They are all entertaining in their own way, as he is a wonderful storyteller, but nothing comes close to the achievement of Beautiful Ruins, a book I will never stop thinking about. I can still physically feel in my chest what it felt like to be reading that book.
A few years later, I met Jess Walter’s agent at a literary event at The Loft in Minneapolis. He was a humble and interesting guy. He said Beautiful Ruins was like a once-in-a-career bolt of lightning, that Jess Walter had been a pretty good writer with a journalism background who wrote police procedurals, but out of nowhere this miracle of a book appeared and changed both their lives forever. Both he and the writer were not taking the success of Beautiful Ruins for granted, and they both knew that lightning doesn’t strike twice. Especially lightning that bold, that big, that bright.
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So Far Gone is a great little story, told by a writer with a keen sense of humor who understands pace and setting and character. It’s a real page turner. I could have finished it in two days but I slow walked it a bit as it was on my Kindle and I wanted to bring that on a weekend camping trip.
Alas, while the story ticks over nicely, the writer felt the need to make this a political novel, and he seems to base his entire political philosophy on what he reads on social media.
Note to everyone: don’t do this.
The characters on the right are just caricatures gleaned from conservative Twitter accounts. This is doubly frustrating because Walter can create amazing and memorable characters — and he does it in this very novel, as we meet more than a couple hilarious and interesting and fully formed characters along the way — but instead he dehumanizes the right wing roles, makes them come across as dummies and hicks, and we are all the poorer for it.
Like I said, it’s a page turner, and there were a couple real edge-of-your-seat moments that happen so rarely in books, but it’s just too topical, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s topical in a very one dimensional sense. He could have written the politics right out of this and it would have made for a much better book.
And I say that as someone who more or less agrees with the author’s overall politics.
In the end, I say give this one a pass, and go read Beautiful Ruins instead.
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Next up: Cod, by Mark Kurlansky. Yep, I am reading a book about fish.
Thanks for reading!