Rhys Kinnick has gone off the grid. At Thanksgiving a few years back, a fed-up Rhys punched his conspiracy-theorist son-in-law in the mouth, chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, with no one around except a pack of hungry raccoons.

Now Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep. Can this failed husband and father, a man with no internet and a car that barely runs, reemerge into a broken world to track down his missing daughter and save his sweet, precocious grandchildren from the members of a dangerous militia?

With the help of his caustic ex-girlfriend, a bipolar retired detective, and his only friend (who happens to be furious with him), Kinnick heads off on a wild journey through cultural lunacy and the rubble of a life he thought he’d left behind. 

‘So Far Gone’ is promoted as a quirky and satirical novel. That’s not how it came across to me, and I think that undervalues the book. This isn’t an attempt at dry humour. It’s an exposition of the toxic impact of the normalisation of divisive Christian Nationalist fundamentalist dogma on families. It did a good job in depicting the sense of narrowly avoided despair that comes from helplessly watching the world you valued being torn down by assholes, bigots and idiots.

In the beginning, I sympathised with Kinnick’s desire to withdraw from a world that he doesn’t know how to save and which seems intent on self-destruction. What the book shows is that that kind of retreat is an abdication if it involves cutting yourself off from the people that you love and for whom you have a responsibility.

So why am I setting the book aside at 55%?

I’m not getting traction with the story. Partly it’s the storytelling style, which I find dispassionate and slightly distant. Partly it’s that Kinnick isn’t an easy guy to cheer for. He’s hapless, a little self-pitying and deeply impractical. Mostly it’s because the book really is showing me how screwed up things can get and I’m not seeing any way out of it. 

This is a book filled with memorable people and relevant political and social insights, but I’m just not enjoying reading it.