Take one sanctimonious, reclusive former newspaper reporter and add one conspiracy theory-addled son-in-law. Flavor with two cute grandkids, a Christian separatist militia and a handful of other colorful characters. Stir with a fistfight at Thanksgiving dinner, a kidnapping and a frantic road trip. Bake in a politically fractured environment overheated by misinformation.

Voila! That’s the recipe for Jess Walter’s compulsively readable, thought-provoking and endlessly entertaining novel “So Far Gone,” which is in bookstores.

The National Book Award finalist and internationally bestselling author might be most associated with his stirring historical fiction, such as “Beautiful Ruins” and “The Cold Millions,” but Walter has also been called “a genius of the modern American moment.” And it’s the latter where “So Far Gone” is squarely placed, laced with incisive observations that speak to the present day even as the story weaves a timeless tale of redemption.

Take, for example, where his protagonist, Rhys Kinnick, wonders: “But how far would they go? How far would the country go? A familiar feeling of grim hopelessness washed over Kinnick, the sense that, just when he thought it couldn’t get worse, it not only got worse, but exponentially more insane. Some days, reading the news felt like being on a plane piloted by a lunatic, hurtling toward the ground.”

The seeds of “So Far Gone” took root in “the urge to just throw my cellphone out a window and turn my back on all of the news and the world,” Walter said in a recorded interview for Bookish, the Southern California News Group virtual program about authors. Walter’s full interview runs Friday at 4 p.m. To get the link, go to socalnewsgroup.com/virtualevents.

Throwing his cellphone out the window is exactly the action taken by Kinnick — who, like the author himself, is a former newspaperman, and who, again like the author, was reared and still lives in Spokane, Washington. But of course, there are differences between Walter and his character: He has yet to punch anyone at Thanksgiving dinner.

“Even though that wasn’t my Thanksgiving, like every family, like every person, I’ve experienced a fissure with people that I once was closer to because of the political reality we find ourselves in now,” he said.

In fact, if there is any true villain in “So Far Gone,” it’s the fractured and predatory information systems affecting the entire world.

“I have a friend from elementary school who’s a flat-earther now — we were science kids together, and I don’t know how to relate to that person,” Walter said. “I don’t think the culture has ever been divided like this since the 1960s, when it was the establishment versus the anti-establishment kids. … That is not a generation gap, it’s a reality gap. It’s what information you take in and what world you see because of that.”

Walter said that, as in previous novels “The Zero,” his 2007 satire about life in the wake of a terrorist attack, and “The Financial Lives of the Poets,” about the 2008 financial crisis, “I feel very much like I’m just going to put my head out the window and describe what it feels like as the car goes off the road.

“That’s what I tried to do with this novel in the last couple of years: really imagine what this fissure is costing us,” he said.

But don’t get the idea that the book is some political argument; it’s not. “It isn’t only looking at the sort of right-wing lunacy,” he said. “It’s also looking at kind of left-wing lunacy and a world that just seems a little bit off its axis right now, in all ways. It really is just writing about people and humans and making them fallible and real, hopefully.

“So many people are turned off by politics right now. But what do we really mean by that?” he asked. “It’s affecting our lives in ways that, you know, aren’t about donkeys and elephants. It’s about who we are as a people. And so I wanted to write directly into that. I didn’t want to write an allegory. … To me, the balance in a novel like this is not making it about parties or policies, but about people.”

Those who have read another book of Walter’s, “Every Knee Shall Bow: The Truth & Tragedy of Ruby Ridge & The Randy Weaver Family,” will feel its resonance in “So Far Gone” and its rendering of AOL, or Army of the Lord, the Christian separatist militia. Published in 1995, “Every Knee Shall Bow” was Walter’s first book, which The Washington Post called “ the most comprehensive, even-handed and best written account of Ruby Ridge,” the deadly standoff in northern Idaho between federal agents and White separatist Randy Weaver and his family.

“Ruby Ridge has been in my mind for 30-some years. I think about the effect it had on people, on real human beings trying to live their lives and understand the world,” said Walter, who covered the standoff as a reporter for the Spokane Spokesman-Review. “So to watch what was fringe move into the mainstream over the last few years has been really jarring.”

With “So Far Gone,” Walter said that, as with any good book, he’s reaching for something more than a commentary on current events.

“This novel hopefully captures a moment that we’re in. But you write a novel that you hope someone will read 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years from now, and find truth in it … and it really is a sort of love story about a father and his daughter reconciling after years of also not seeing the same world. You know it isn’t only politics that divides us. It’s our own experience of the same situations that sometimes makes us siloed in our understanding of the world, and that is what I had to cling to in the end.”