The Feral Detective

September 10, 2018
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.

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 society--what 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.

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Starred review from August 1, 2018
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)