On the Way to the End of the World
By Adrianne Harun
Acre Books 2023 

Only readers of a certain vintage and obsessional pickiness will have any first-hand recognition of the historical footnote at the heart of Adrienne Harun’s new novel On the Way to the End of the World: the so-called “Big Walks” inadvertently inspired by US President John F Kennedy in 1963. These 50-mile treks had originally been intended as a presidential goad to the physical fitness requirements of the Marines, but the idea soon spread — first, disastrously, to Kennedy’s own Cabinet, and then to the populace at large, who responded to the malaise of the moment by going on these impromptu marathon walks, either alone or in groups.

Harun’s narrative follows one such group which gathers in the pre-dawn darkness of their small Pacific Northwest mill-town of Humtown with the goal of walking to “a cliffside beauty spot” called Spetle Cliff, commonly known as The End of the World. This disparate group’s members  — some teenage girls, a couple of oddball loners, the town gossip, a grieving widow — mostly have a nodding acquaintance with each other but certainly aren’t all friends, and in Harun’s sensitive handling, there’s a genuinely awkward leaping-off feeling to the beginning of their unlikely trek. 

The walk has scarcely begun before Harun’s narrative presence is winding its way around and through the stories of all the walkers. This is not a pilgrimage to Canterbury; our travelers’ tales are as often as not unspoken amongst themselves. But in blunt but gentle terms, readers learn all those stories, from the stark secrets of teenager Avis, the book’s most garish character, to the complex grief of the widow Caroline, the book’s most interesting character (she lost her husband to the Columbus Day Storm in mid-October of that year, and indeed, that “Storm of the Century” hangs over the narrative like an extra person). Even the blunderingly malicious gossip, Helen Hubka, becomes gradually more understandable as the walk prolongs — although not any more likable, since the reader immediately shares the other walkers’ suspicion that she only came on the expedition in the first place to collect more gossip. 

This is a book of subtle storytelling triumphs, and one of the most persistent of these is the contrast between the walkers, whose project might spring from complex personal motives but is essentially frivolous, and some of the people the walkers meet along the way, who have no choice but to wander the area’s by-roads:

Caroline can see then, ahead of them, three men sitting on a wood-plank bench not far from the gulley that separates the trail from the raised train track. Raggedy men, users to avoiding townspeople. As they catch sight of the walkers, two rise, pick up their bundles, and climb into the woods above, disappearing almost at once onto a thin parallel dirt path she’s only now noticed. One is limping badly, but doesn’t seem cowed. He shoots the walkers a look of fierce assessment that makes even Helen Hubka hesitate a moment before proceeding. This last hobo stays still, doesn’t even blink, it seems, until they are nearly upon him. 

The frivolity is ultimately laid bare as well, with characters sharing the story of how only Robert Kennedy, alone of JFK’s Cabinet, actually persevered to finish their own Big Walk — and how JFK himself, as one character mentions, never even attempted it:

“You know, Bobby may have, but JFK hasn’t done this walk himself. He gathered a few of his fancier friends, including that Prince Radziwill, got ‘em all together down in Palm Beach, then set them off on the fifty miles. Our Hero followed for a few miles, sitting in the back of a white Lincoln convertible, waving little American flags and sipping on a daiquiri. His health, apparently, wouldn’t allow him to participate. No lie.”

The takeaways of On the Way to the End of the World are as intelligently muted as the rest of the book. Readers will doubtless appreciate that Caroline is, knowingly or otherwise, progressing from darkness to a kind of unpredictable light — but the rest of them? The underlying meaning, if any, of what they share during their walk? It’s an odd split: readers will remember the events of this novel long after, they suspect, most of the novel’s characters have forgotten them. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.