a short note in appreciation of Jess Walter
Finding myself writing about character in the journal I'm keeping on Minus Theatre workshops, it is in respect of character, of the curve of character, that this short note is the asymptote. I read Jess Walter's novel So Far Gone, 2025, and requested the other three novels my local library has in its collection, and each impresses me with its difference from the others. Citizen Vince inhabits Vince Camden, a small-time part of the Spokane underworld; Beautiful Ruins follows actress Dee Moray to Italy in 1962 and Pasquale Tursi following her 50 years later to Hollywood; The Cold Millions embeds itself in the lives of brothers Rye and Gig Dolan, again in Spokane, where Jess Walter is said to live, at the beginning of the 20th century and at the start of the labour movement.
What Walter is doing in these books is social history but social history motivated by an intense engagement with character that includes a commitment to his character's values, an engagement, and commitment to authenticity, which are egoless. In So Far Gone there is a tendency to read through Rhys Kinnick's curmudgeonly journalist-gone-bush, because he's been sidelined by extremist and fundamentalist modern America, to the author; but starting Citizen Vince and dipping into Beautiful Ruins, I think of Walter's writing as a kind of camouflage. It is transparent, so clear it's difficult to notice its modulations of pitch, audible in the dialogue and diegetic indirect discourse of the prose, or its colour-changing, down to the minute adjustments of hue that suffuse the skin of the writing, like a chameleon, to fit the worlds his characters inhabit.
I can't think of another writer I've encountered who removes so well the distance separating themselves from their characters. And to cap it, it's not method-y. The writing downplays what it's doing, which is how it achieves—where Foucault wanted his writing to be like velvet—a texture as smooth as the skin, through which we feel and which we read for that which is characteristic of character.
