Review by New York Times Review
so can we all agree that the center didn't hold? Yeats warned us it wouldn't. Didion reminded us. And now, in America at least, the center is a vast, smoking pit across which two furious armies block each other on Twitter. Jonathan Lethem's new book may be billed as a detective novel for simplicity's sake - and to remind us of his breakthrough, "Motherless Brooklyn" - but when did Lethem ever do anything simple? In "The Feral Detective," a Manhattanite named Phoebe Siegler hires a private eye and searches the outskirts of Los Angeles and the Mojave Desert for a friend's runaway daughter. What she's really looking for is a way to understand the world after the ascension of Donald Trump. Along the way, the book grows menacing and allegorical, and winks Lethem-ly at so many storytelling archetypes - the road movie, the journey into darkness, the return of the king, the Mad Max-ish dystopia - that it's hard to imagine such a strange machine actually flying. And it doesn't, not without turbulence. "The Feral Detective" is full of pleasures and annoyances. It's a frustrating novel and, when you set it on the bedside table for the night, you feel like telling it, "You stay there until you can behave yourself." But while it's not essential Lethem, the book grows in your estimation in retrospect, and upon rereading, because of its ambitions, its sneaky tenderness and the relevance of its questions about identity and tribal warfare. Lethem introduces Phoebe with hasty, anthropological brush strokes because he's eager to get to the weird stuff on the menu: She's a 33-year-old journalist and Harvard grad. She grew up on the Upper East Side, where old issues of The New Yorker congregated in the master bathroom. Both her parents are shrinks. (Oy.) As the novel opens, it's November 2016. Phoebe has been shaken by the presidential election - "I blamed my city for producing and being unable to defeat the monster in the tower" - and when her bosses at The New York Times invite "the Beast-Elect" into the building for a meet-and-greet, she quits in protest. ("I think I won Facebook for that day, for what it's worth.") Eager to know what lurks beyond her liberal comfort zone, she heads to Los Angeles to search for 18-year-old Arabella, who fled the grid for reasons of her own. This is very much a novel about the lost looking for the lost. As the feral detective himself tells Phoebe laconically, "Who's not missing?" Phoebe enlists the help of the private eye in question, Charles Heist, early on and their relationship drives the book - sometimes powerfully, sometimes off the road. Heist is "feral" in the sense that he's rootless, unpredictable and hairy. He's about 20 years older than Phoebe. There's a freaky tween girl sleeping in his office until he can find a safe place for her and an opossum with a urinary tract infection residing in one of his desk drawers. Phoebe is both intrigued and repulsed by Heist. Having seen movies, you will recognize this as the prelude to soulful sex in the detective's sketchy trailer. Lethem's chief metaphor in "The Feral Detective" finds the "wild edge" of Los Angeles - i.e., the city's proximity to the ocean and mountains - standing in for all that's volatile and unknown beneath the surface of society. An acquaintance of Phoebe's announces this theme in neon: "You can feel the civilization as this kind of thin layer that's just been troweled onto the landscape. It's, like, everything's provisional." (That's a Didion-esque passage, of course; she hovers overs this novel like an archangel.) Phoebe shadows Heist on an ugly, downward-spiraling search for Arabella. They question dispossessed men and women living in tunnels, stumble on a ritualistic double murder atop Mount Baldy and descend into the thick of two tense, nomadic tribes in the desert. One tribe, called the Rabbits, is largely female and vegan; the other, the Bears, has more of a Hells Angels vibe. The plot is high on incident but feels meandering and oddly tension-less for the first half of the book. And Phoebe - Phoebe can be a problem. She's our guide and conscience, yet Lethem colors her character in so slowly that she's on the edge of a breakdown before we can grasp who she is. Phoebe is sarcastic and occasionally vulgar. She makes dangerous choices. She loathes Heist for his taciturn masculinity, then yearns to jump him again: "I wanted to slap him, but I might have damaged the tender flesh of my hand on his die-cut features, his Brillo sideburns." At times, she seems less like somebody destabilized by the new political order and more like somebody tapering off Zoloft. It's not a sexist portrayal, but in a blind taste test you would know that this book was written by a man. Phoebe appears to be a mouthpiece for Lethem's own rage, and she's not an especially convincing portrait of a woman. It's not enough to have her use the word "menstrual" and read Elena Ferrante. As for the feral detective, he's an enigma by design. The true mystery of the novel is not what became of Arabella (which proves anticlimactic), but who Charles Heist is and how his life story intersects with the history of the Rabbits and Bears. Phoebe tries to plumb the detective's depths with both charm and fury, but she's out of her element: "Soon Heist was silent while I railed at him, amid empty hills born to swallow human language, carved by time to make my protests small." Halfway through the novel, Lethem just about switches genres on us as Phoebe and Heist are drawn into a gladiatorial battle in the desert involving the Bear clan and its throne. Lethem has taken us so far from the liberal bubble so fast that you've either got to go with it or go home. Go with it. Even the author seems to know that he's pushed the plot over the top because he punctures the savagery with humor, as when Phoebe screams at the Bears watching the fight, telling them they're insane and demanding to know if they even voted. At its best, though, "The Feral Detective" is a worthy morality play about our warring impulses for conflict and comfort. It asks who we are when we lose, or cast away, everything that was propping us up. Phoebe's relationship with Heist turns out to be unexpectedly moving, and she's transformed in a way that feels authentic. "The dark opened my eyes," she says of the desert at night. "The sky flooded in, without boundary. It was sick with stars, a hundred for every one I felt ought to exist. I had to keep an eye on them all at once, in case they began to fall." Lethem is often praised for the breadth of his imagination. But the most resonant moments here are tender and capture people searching for solace after trauma: "It was incredible that such broken things would presume to care for one another." As in Didion's vintage nonfiction, the characters in "The Feral Detective" suffer from a disorder caused by history itself. In "The White Album," Didion wrote wryly of her trip to a psychiatric clinic: "An attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968." Phoebe could say much the same thing 50 years later. You can get dizzy staring into the void where the center used to be. There's an opossum with a urinary tract infection residing in one of the fertil detective's desk drawers. JEFF GILES is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the author of the series "The Edge of Everything."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 14, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Nearly two decades after his last mystery, Motherless Brooklyn (1999), Lethem gives us another, a funny but rage-fueled stunner about a New Yorker tracking her mentor's missing daughter on the West Coast. When 18-year-old Arabella disappears from Reed College, talkative Phoebe reaches out to taciturn Charles Heist, who is either a feral detective, a detective who finds feral youths, or both it's not immediately clear. Together, they track Arabella (who is using Phoebe's name) up Mount Baldy to a Buddhist retreat and then out into the Mojave Desert where Arabella may be among the Rabbits or the Bears, two long-established communities of off-the-gridders with very different cultures. Set in the days surrounding Donald Trump's inauguration, this echoes with Phoebe's explicitly voiced outrage and sadness about the country's political right turn, yet it also feels allegorical, what with lost tribes wandering in the desert and all. Lethem, apparently, began writing feverishly the day after Trump was elected, and it's fascinating to read a book set at such a specific and recent moment. Both Phoebe and Charles are compelling, as are the desert setting and the vividly realized descriptions of its dwellers, who, seeing their own country grow alien, have left the center for the margins. Politics aside, it's an unrelentingly paced tale where the protagonists' developing relationship is just as interesting as the puzzle they're trying to solve. Utterly unique and absolutely worthwhile.--Keir Graff Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Lethem hits a wall in his forgettable latest (following A Gambler's Anatomy). Phoebe Siegler, a consummate New Yorker, travels to the Mojave Desert in search of Arabella, a friend's missing daughter and an 18-year-old dropout of Reed College. She hires hirsute Charles Heist, the "feral detective," who lives with three dogs and an opossum. Quickly falling for his woodsy charms, Phoebe travels with Heist to the far reaches of the desert, where the mostly female Rabbit group is engaged in a long standoff with the male Bear group. To save Arabella, Heist will have to do battle with the charismatic Bear leader, called Solitary Love, as Phoebe learns to question her assumptions here on "the far side of the Neoliberal Dream." The novel feels like it was written as a kind of therapy in the aftermath of the 2016 election-which Lethem's characters frequently bring up-as well as the death of Leonard Cohen, who also gets a lot of ink. None of this can salvage the book, which features howling men and howling bad prose (during a sex scene, Phoebe longs for Heist to "uncrimp my foil"), making this tone-deaf Raymond Chandler pastiche an experiment worth avoiding. (Nov.) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Lethem (A Gambler's Anatomy, 2016, etc.) returns with his first surrealistic, genre-bending detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn (1999).Having long abandoned Brooklyn for the West Coast, Lethem has written a hallucinatory novel set in the desert fringes of the Inland Empire in California. Readers, many of whom should be absorbed by this story, will soon realize the author has more to say about the current state of America and his deeply fractured heroine than lies on the surface. Our narrator is Phoebe Siegler, once a bourgeois Manhattanite with a sarcastic streak, now unmoored by the last presidential election. Trying to break her malaise, she travels to Los Angeles at the behest of a friend whose teenage daughter has disappeared during a Leonard Cohen-inspired pilgrimage to Mount Baldy. She's referred to private detective Charles Heist, a "fiftyish cowboyish fellow" dubbed "The Feral Detective" for his predilection for saving strays, be they kids or animals. What might have devolved into a Coen Brothers-esque farce instead offers a dark reflection on human nature as Heist introduces Phoebe to something like a cult living on the fringes of societywhat might happen if hippies and outcasts left civilization, never to return, devolving into a tribal, ritualistic culture tinged with conspiracy theory. It's a place where the seemingly laconic Heist has deep roots and a culture where his mere presence yields disturbing violence. There's not really a mystery to solve, and the sexual tension between Phoebe and Heist feels obligatory, but Lethem fills his canvas with tinder-dry tension. The subtext is the division in American society, but the personal nature of Phoebe's tectonic shift in the desert is palpable, made flesh by Lethem's linguistic alchemy. "Old fears had flown the coop without my noticing and been replaced: I was positively aching to abscond into the Mojave again, the fewer road signs the better," she says. "No cities for me now, or families or tribes."A haunting tour of the gulf between the privileged and the dispossessed. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
