People of Interest
How Far Do You Have to Go to Escape?
It turns out that Whidbey Island, Washington, is still not quite far enough — but it's a start.
Whidbey Island sits in Puget Sound, about thirty miles north of Seattle, and is the longest island in the contiguous United States by some measures, though local Whidbeyan pride on this point may slightly exceed the cartographic evidence. It is home to artists, writers, retired people who made enough money in Seattle to leave Seattle, and a substantial naval air station that breaks the pastoral spell at irregular intervals with fighter jets roaring low over the water. It is, in other words, a place people go to escape something — and a place from which complete escape remains, for structural reasons, impossible.
This makes it an interesting setting for a novel. The island has appeared in American fiction before — its particular combination of natural beauty, enforced community, and proximity to the mainland (the ferry to Mukilteo runs every thirty minutes, and the mainland is right there) creates a version of the escape scenario that the island-as-paradise narrative usually avoids: you are not far enough away to stop checking your phone, not close enough to the thing you left to deal with it directly. You are in a kind of suspended middle distance, which is precisely where interesting fiction happens.
Whidbey Island's particular geography — close enough to the mainland to feel its pull, far enough to feel the resistance — makes it a perfect setting for fiction about the limits of retreat.
The book reviewed in this issue of Strong Words — whose full title is unfortunately truncated in the source material available to this conversion (see footer note), though the review text suggests it continues the phrase "HOW FAR DO YOU HAVE TO GO TO ESCAPE FROM AN…" — appears to centre on a protagonist who has relocated to Whidbey Island in flight from something on the mainland. Whether this something is a person, a job, an algorithm, a catastrophic life event, or some more diffuse accumulation of twenty-first-century pressure is, again, a matter for the source PDF to specify. What the Strong Words review appears to argue is that the novel uses the island setting with genuine intelligence — not as a backdrop for cosy retreat fantasy, but as a location that dramatises the thesis built into its title: that geographical distance is, in the end, a poor substitute for actual resolution.
This is a theme with considerable contemporary traction. We are in a period of peak retreat culture: digital detox, remote work relocations, the pastoral fantasy that sits at the heart of a good deal of lifestyle content and not a small amount of literary fiction. The novel that takes this fantasy seriously — that follows a character who has genuinely committed to the move, the island, the clean break — and then examines what the fantasy fails to deliver is performing a useful cultural service. It is also, if done well, considerably more interesting than the novel that simply endorses the retreat and describes the fog and the eagles and the Dungeness crab.
The island itself — the physical reality of Whidbey — is apparently rendered with close attention in the novel. This matters. Pacific Northwest landscape writing has a particular quality when it is done well: the light is specific, the rain is specific, the trees are specific, and the relationship between natural beauty and human restlessness that the setting embodies is one that the best writers working in this territory have used to consider questions about what we want and what we can actually have. Marilynne Robinson, Richard Hugo, and — more recently — Lydia Millet have all worked versions of this territory, each finding in the American West not a resolution but a question sharpened by space and weather.
Whether the novel under review belongs in this company is for the source PDF to determine. What seems clear from Strong Words' coverage is that it earns the setting — that the island is not window dressing but structural argument, and that the thing the narrator is escaping from (whatever that thing fully is) is a sufficiently interesting object that we care about the pursuit. Ferry crossings, it turns out, are not a plot device but a diagnosis: you can get on the boat as many times as you like. The question is what you do when you run out of islands.