The Feral Detective

I'm probably not the only reader out there who felt a little let down by Jonathan Lethem's recent output, but maybe we really do demand too much of our heroes: having written "Motherless Brooklyn" and "The Fortress of Solitude," I'm not sure if he has anything to prove to anyone. Even so, I thought that "Chronic City" was a major downer, a dull, plotless mess, so I kind of let him be for a while. "The Feral Detective" is the first Lethem I've picked up in a while and I'm glad to report that it is something like a return to form.

It also seems like a return to his natural inclinations. Lethem's books have always transmitted his love for genre writing -- specifically crime novels -- and with private eye and all-around mystery man Robert show more Heist, it feels that Lethem's back on solid ground. There are other echoes here, too: he still seems fascinated with the destructive fallout from the utopian living experiments of the late sixties and with gentrification and class divides, issues that have taken on new urgency in contemporary, Trumpified America.

As for the book itself, we follow a former lower-level media employee -- a New York girl if there ever was one -- scour the rural of highlands in search of a missing teenager. The natives are not friendly, and we make the acquaintance of some appropriately symbolic post-sixties animal-themed tribes, a plot development that will probably strike some readers as too on-the-nose. I'm not sure that Lethem means to be so neatly didactic though and the book is fast-moving and crisply written. A lot of California lit seems entranced by the state's awesome landscape, but the main character of "The Feral Detective" has a brain that won't shut up, and how much you'll like the book may depend on how high a tolerance for that sort of thing you have. This novel is both the search for a lost girl and for meaningful community in a fractured, exhausted America, but I feel that Lethem does just enough to avoid easy answers to make our tagging along on this trip worthwhile. It's true: we'll probably be seeing dozens of books that deal with how to form real bonds in the midst of our current national disarray, but not every writer out there has Lethem's steady hand, or his talent for writing appealingly addictive, flexible prose. I was glad to have found the author in good form here. Maybe I should check out some of the novels he wrote while the country was busy falling apart and I was busy reading other stuff. show less

Even some 20 years after reading “Motherless Brooklyn” I can still remember the enchantment of reading it. Since then I have been a devoted Jonathan Letham reader. Despite being in the midst of a couple other books, I dropped everything to read The Feral Detective. I was more excited than usual because he was returning to the detective genre.

When Arabella, the daughter of Phoebe’s best friend, goes missing soon after Leonard Cohen’s death and the 2016 election, Phoebe, who is at loose ends after quitting her New York Times job in disgust, volunteers to go look for her at a California Zen mountain retreat Cohen used to frequent. She hires a local detective known for finding people named Charles Heist, the titular feral show more detective.

Their search takes them to the mountain and a horrific murder as well as to the mountains where two groups of anti-social misfits aggregate in loose tribes, the Rabbits and the Bears. As the book is so much a reaction to the election, it is tempting to see the Rabbits and Bears as blue and red teams. The Rabbits are mostly women and children and more or less live off the land in tune with nature. The Bears are mostly men, violent, and rage-filled. Their leader is called Solitary Love, I kid you not.

There’s a fair amount of adventure and derring-do by the men. The women mostly spectate or wait. Even when Phoebe acts, her acts are impulsive and completed by men. When a young girl she has brought with her acts to rescue them, even that rescue is completed by Heist. Women never get to solve, rescue, or complete anything.

That would perhaps be less irritating if the narrator were not a woman. The story is told by Phoebe, an urban dweller meeting a reclusive man. She’s from the city, he’s from the desert. She’s sophisticated, he lives in a trailer with a possum. She’s East Coast, he’s Western desert. It’s like the “Green Acres” song, “Goodbye City Life.” So, of course, she falls madly in love with Heist though we don’t know why, really, except maybe, sex. He is mostly silent and uncommunicative, just very good-looking and obviously concerned for the feral children of the Rabbits and Bears whom he hopes to rescue.

Jonathan Lethem keeps disappointing me lately. The Feral Detective is a greater disappointment because I had hoped his return to the detective genre might spark the genius of “Motherless Brooklyn.” The book has many Letham hallmarks, it’s full of pop culture references, it’s sometimes absurdly funny and wildly imaginative. Imagine a Ferris wheel prison, if you will.

Letham has his usual word magic, for example, “That coffee was a wiper blade, cutting a window for my brain to peer through.” However, the emotion is false. Perhaps it is narrating through the voice of a woman. Can a man even understand the betrayal that election was, the rejection of this competent woman who could talk in detail on nearly any policy for a babbling grifter who can’t string two thoughts together? In rejecting the hypercompetent Hillary, America told women we can never be enough. Rejecting her for the orange sack of hate, resentment, insecurity, and narcissism, for someone so manifestly incompetent, was more than rejection, it was annihilation.

And Letham gives us Phoebe, a shallow chatterbox who highest aspiration seems to be the Manic Pixie Dream Girl of Heist’s dreams. Why?

The Feral Detective at Harper Collins
Jonathan Lethem author site

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2018/11/16/9780062859068/ show less

Was für eine kuriose Geschichte, in der so ziemlich alle gängigen Genres durcheinander gewürfelt sind: Krimi, Dystopie, Liebesgeschichte, Abenteuerroman - für alle ist etwas dabei ;-)
Nach Trumps Wahlsieg kündigt Phoebe Siegler voller Entsetzen ihren gut bezahlten Medienjob in New York und macht sich für ihre Freundin auf die Suche nach deren verschwundener Teenagertochter. Am Rand der kalifornischen Wüste trifft sie den 'wilden' Detektiv, der sie unterstützt und in den sich Phoebe verliebt. Ihre Nachforschungen führen die Beiden auf einen geheimnisvollen Berg, auf dem mysteriöse Dinge geschehen; in einen Schwemmkessel, wo die Ärmsten der Armen hausen; in die Wüste, wo der Stamm der Kaninchen in Einklang mit der Natur lebt show more und die Bären sich in anarcho-machohafter Weise düsteren Dystopiephantasien hingeben.
Das klingt chaotisch und etwas wirr? Das ist es auch, wozu der Erzählstil der leicht neurotischen New Yorkerin Phoebe das Seine dazu beiträgt. Sie springt nicht nur zwischen den Zeiten (wobei sich das in Maßen hält), sondern entwickelt auch gelegentlich Gedankengänge, die nicht immer leicht nachzuvollziehen sind. Ihren Zorn über die Wahl Trumps lässt sie immer wieder freien Lauf, während ihr Umfeld häufig keine Ahnung hat, wovon sie redet (und ich manchmal auch nicht ;-)). Zudem gibt es vergleichsweise viele Verweise auf zumeist US-Amerikanische ZeitgenossInnen, die unsereins (ok, mir) nicht immer geläufig waren. Vermutlich verliert das Buch so an manchem Witz, aber ich habe mich trotzdem hin und wieder gut amüsiert: "'Was ist ein Downer?' - 'Ein kranker Bär.' - 'Und was macht ihr mit dem?' - 'Wir pflegen ihn natürlich gesund. Wenns ihm dann besser geht, können wir ihn umbringen.'"
Es passiert eine Menge in dieser Geschichte; es gibt Tote, geheimnisvolle Asiaten, ein König soll gekrönt werden - aber nichts wird wirklich aufgeklärt. Ob es da einen Teil 2 geben wird? Oder entspricht es einfach dem Durcheinander, das in diesem Buch Programm ist?
Erwähnenswert ist in jedem Fall die außergewöhnliche Sprache des Autors, die für den Übersetzer vermutlich Schwerstarbeit bedeutete (meine Hochachtung!): "... die Bäume wurden seltener, das Wüstengestrüpp tüpfelte den staubigen, geschundenen Boden mit der Kraftlosigkeit von Achselhöhlengrün oder Teenagerschamhaaren."
Fünfzig Seiten hat es ca. gebraucht und dann hatte mich das Buch in seinem Bann ;-) Etwas weniger Chaos wäre vielleicht nicht schlecht gewesen, aber nichtsdestotrotz hat es mich gut unterhalten. show less

While trying to find her friend's missing teen daughter in the Los Angeles area, New Yorker Phoebe Siegler enlists the reluctant assistance of Charles Heist, a loner of few words who seems immune to Phoebe's sarcasm and nearly non-stop talking. I was expecting the story to be told from Heist's point of view; instead, it's told from Phoebe's narration as she continually reconsiders her opinion of Heist and even herself.

The search for the missing Arabella takes Phoebe and Heist up a mountain, then into the desert where Phoebe encounters people living off the grid who challenge her way of thinking. The story is set in the early days of the Trump administration, which provides a backdrop for Phoebe's unraveling. Finding Arabella is the plot show more point that sets the story in motion, but it's Phoebe's snarky voice that gives the book its soul. show less

A novel of Trump's America ("the Beast-elect," "the monster in the tower," etc.). Post-election, Phoebe Siegler has quit her news job and come west in search of her friend's missing daughter Arabella. She hires Charles Heist to find her. Raised in a primitive commune-like setting in the Mojave Desert till he ran away at 14, though he can never really escape, Heist will earn his moniker--the Feral Detective. Funny, apocalyptic, brutally violent--our surreal American moment.

Yes, he's one of my favorite authors, but I tore through this one. Female 1st person POV, done well, unusual. Themes of literally finding others & finding one's self, #MeToo echoes in the Rabbit/Bear societies, 2016 elections mentioned in passing when needed, many things standing in for other things, but seriously looking for personal connection. NYC to start, then way west, AZ, I think. Interesting, funny, crazy-good writing, often. More like this, please.

The main character is one of the worst-written female characters I've read. She lives only for male attention, immediately needing to sleep with the titular detective for no apparent reason other than he's there. She's like the Edmund Hillary of hookups. Her inner monologues fail the Bechdel Test.

As frustrating as all of that is, what really bothered me was Lethem's complete indifference to the details of how a woman might live. The character frequently mentions her purse, which makes an appearance in any situation -- hiking through the desert with no water, for example -- leaving me to wonder what _kind_ of purse it was. A clutch, a hobo, a tote, a satchel, a cross-body? A young Manhattanite working in media would have vocabulary for show more this. She would not say "purse". And, she would not call her toiletry bag a "Dopp kit". A simple Google search would have confirmed this for the author, but it seems like he didn't even clock the need to investigate what his character's reality might be like. Consequently, she doesn't read like any known human being, and the book is an unsatisfying and disappointing read. show less