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The Feral Detective
Jonathan Lethem's first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn
"One of America's greatest storytellers." --Washington Post
Phoebe Siegler first meets Charles Heist in a shabby trailer on the eastern edge of Los Angeles. She's looking for her friend's missing daughter, Arabella, and hires Heist to help. A laconic loner who keeps his pet opossum in a desk drawer, Heist intrigues the sarcastic and garrulous Phoebe. Reluctantly, he agrees to help. The unlikely pair navigate the enclaves of desert-dwelling vagabonds and find that Arabella is in serious trouble--caught in the middle of a violent standoff that only Heist, mysteriously, can end. Phoebe's trip to the desert was always going to be strange, but it was never supposed to be dangerous. . . .
Jonathan Lethem's first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn, The Feral Detective is a singular achievement by one of our greatest writers.
"One of America's greatest storytellers." --Washington Post
Phoebe Siegler first meets Charles Heist in a shabby trailer on the eastern edge of Los Angeles. She's looking for her friend's missing daughter, Arabella, and hires Heist to help. A laconic loner who keeps his pet opossum in a desk drawer, Heist intrigues the sarcastic and garrulous Phoebe. Reluctantly, he agrees to help. The unlikely pair navigate the enclaves of desert-dwelling vagabonds and find that Arabella is in serious trouble--caught in the middle of a violent standoff that only Heist, mysteriously, can end. Phoebe's trip to the desert was always going to be strange, but it was never supposed to be dangerous. . . .
Jonathan Lethem's first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn, The Feral Detective is a singular achievement by one of our greatest writers.
336 pages, Paperback
First published November 6, 2018
811 people are currently reading
5315 people want to read
About the author
Jonathan Lethem
236 books2,649 followersJonathan Allen Lethem (born February 19, 1964) is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer.
His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller.
In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship
His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller.
In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 810 reviews
March 3, 2019
Mostly, this book makes me sad.
Should you read it?
Only after you read all that other stuff.
I loved Motherless Brooklyn. This? This bears no similarity in characterization, plot, setting, narrative, or subtlety. I suppose a disconnected sex/relationship scene is the same. But otherwise, no relationship. It's littered with political references (I really don't need anti-Trump references in my escapist fiction) that will make this feel dated by 2025, and cultural references that might not survive much longer (such as Phoebe's own weak bear joke). Recommend a hard pass.
Should you read it?
Only after you read all that other stuff.
I loved Motherless Brooklyn. This? This bears no similarity in characterization, plot, setting, narrative, or subtlety. I suppose a disconnected sex/relationship scene is the same. But otherwise, no relationship. It's littered with political references (I really don't need anti-Trump references in my escapist fiction) that will make this feel dated by 2025, and cultural references that might not survive much longer (such as Phoebe's own weak bear joke). Recommend a hard pass.
January 17, 2019
When I first saw the title The Feral Detective I imagined Humphrey Bogart as a werewolf. I guess if I want that book I’ll have to write it myself.
Phoebe Siegler is a lady from New York who quits her media job after the election of 2016. To distract herself from thinking about the living nightmare that America is about to become she heads west to California looking for the daughter of a friend of hers who dropped out of a school and hasn’t been in touch with her mother. The trail leads to the desert areas of Inland Empire and Phoebe enlists the aid of a local detective with a reputation for being able to find people. Phoebe expects to meet the kind of low rent PI you usually see in pop culture, but she gets something very different in Charlie Heist whose eccentric ways both intrigue and infuriate her. It appears that the missing girl has gone to live among some of the outcasts that populate the area, and she also learns that Charlie’s strange history includes links to some of those people.
I know that Jonathan Lethem is a Very Serious Author who does Lit-A-Chur known for ‘fusing genres’. Which I think essentially means he puts tropes in a blender and then gets nominated for lots of awards unlike those rubes who just write straight genre fiction. That shows here with a plot set-up that kind of sounds like it could be a big studio movie trailer, but then things get weird.
I enjoyed parts of this quite a bit. Especially Phoebe’s shell-shocked reactions to the election of an orange nightmare to the supposed highest office in the land. This is the first book I’ve read that had some serious reflection on that whole stunned WTF-just-happened? thing some of us went through in the immediate aftermath as well as the creeping dread of wondering just how bad it would get. (So bad. So very bad.)
The plot also fooled me in the same way that it sets up expectations much like how Phoebe thinks she’s starting her own personal mystery story by going to hire a detective. I’ve consumed plenty of stories about young women going missing, and I was expecting Charlie to lead us through seedy bars to a serial killer’s lair or a sex trafficking ring or something similar. Instead we go out to the desert and start meeting all those weird characters living an existence entirely off the grid. That’s interesting as is Charlie himself who comes across as a complete enigma that neither Phoebe nor the reader can get a handle on until late in the book.
However, this a man writing in first person about a very privileged white woman leaving her East Coast bubble and going on a kind of journey of self-discovery. Which sounds like a really bad blog that would get turned into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon. That’s problematic at times although to be fair Letham writes Phoebe to be painfully self-aware of this. Yet she also can’t stop acting like a whining ninny despite often knowing better. That gets pretty annoying after a while although it seems designed to be that way so I feel silly complaining. It’s still annoying though.
I’m left scratching my head over the whole thing. It was interesting with some very good writing, but I kinda wish that Megan Abbott would have done this book instead of Jonathan Lethem.
Phoebe Siegler is a lady from New York who quits her media job after the election of 2016. To distract herself from thinking about the living nightmare that America is about to become she heads west to California looking for the daughter of a friend of hers who dropped out of a school and hasn’t been in touch with her mother. The trail leads to the desert areas of Inland Empire and Phoebe enlists the aid of a local detective with a reputation for being able to find people. Phoebe expects to meet the kind of low rent PI you usually see in pop culture, but she gets something very different in Charlie Heist whose eccentric ways both intrigue and infuriate her. It appears that the missing girl has gone to live among some of the outcasts that populate the area, and she also learns that Charlie’s strange history includes links to some of those people.
I know that Jonathan Lethem is a Very Serious Author who does Lit-A-Chur known for ‘fusing genres’. Which I think essentially means he puts tropes in a blender and then gets nominated for lots of awards unlike those rubes who just write straight genre fiction. That shows here with a plot set-up that kind of sounds like it could be a big studio movie trailer, but then things get weird.
I enjoyed parts of this quite a bit. Especially Phoebe’s shell-shocked reactions to the election of an orange nightmare to the supposed highest office in the land. This is the first book I’ve read that had some serious reflection on that whole stunned WTF-just-happened? thing some of us went through in the immediate aftermath as well as the creeping dread of wondering just how bad it would get. (So bad. So very bad.)
The plot also fooled me in the same way that it sets up expectations much like how Phoebe thinks she’s starting her own personal mystery story by going to hire a detective. I’ve consumed plenty of stories about young women going missing, and I was expecting Charlie to lead us through seedy bars to a serial killer’s lair or a sex trafficking ring or something similar. Instead we go out to the desert and start meeting all those weird characters living an existence entirely off the grid. That’s interesting as is Charlie himself who comes across as a complete enigma that neither Phoebe nor the reader can get a handle on until late in the book.
However, this a man writing in first person about a very privileged white woman leaving her East Coast bubble and going on a kind of journey of self-discovery. Which sounds like a really bad blog that would get turned into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon. That’s problematic at times although to be fair Letham writes Phoebe to be painfully self-aware of this. Yet she also can’t stop acting like a whining ninny despite often knowing better. That gets pretty annoying after a while although it seems designed to be that way so I feel silly complaining. It’s still annoying though.
I’m left scratching my head over the whole thing. It was interesting with some very good writing, but I kinda wish that Megan Abbott would have done this book instead of Jonathan Lethem.
March 16, 2022
On the Wild Edge
A somewhat vacuous, somewhat lascivious thirty something wannabe journalist named Phoebe, goes adventuring in the Inland Empire of California, and that endless conurbation east of Los Angeles along the oddly named Christopher Columbus Transcontinental Highway. Her trip is an encounter with the void that is at the heart of her Conradian search for the missing daughter of a friend. Her companion and guide is Heist, the eponymous detective who, although distracted with nursing an opossum with a urinary tract issue, knows the territory.
The real spur to her mission is not her friendship with the girl’s mother but the election of Donald Trump. Such a topsy-turvey world obviously demands a Quixotic response. The opportunity was there, so hey - Karma. And the strangeness of Southern California to a New Yorker seemed just the right escapist therapy: “.. here in the Inland Empire, in this zone between, where I could no longer glimpse the world that was anyhow irretrievable.”
The thing about Southern California, of course, is that your average suburb can border on some pretty unconventional places. Orange County had both Richard Nixon and the Symbionese Liberation Army in close proximity. San Bernardino County, Lethem’s locus, is bigger than the state of New Jersey with dozens of wilderness areas butting up against its densely populated housing developments. So it’s only to be expected that some typical transitional types show up in fairly quick succession - tunnel-dwellers, off-grid communitarians engaged in tribal warfare, secretive Korean survivalists/lapis miners, and homicidal Buddhist carnival operators.
It is in one of these wildernesses that Lethem places his heart of darkness - a Zen monastery rumoured to be recently inhabited by Leonard Cohen, an idol of the missing girl, who has also taken to using the name Phoebe.* The monastery is one part of a parallel universe, an alternative non-civilisation which doesn’t even know who Donald Trump is much less care about his presidency. These are the hard core descendants of Californian hippiedom, still waiting for the apocalypse, ...“survivors of the catastrophe that hadn’t happened yet.”
As it turns out, the missing girl gets found, which leads on, like an old-fashioned Hopalong Cassidy Saturday matinee, to further adventures -sexual and criminal - among the murderous sub-cultures of San Bernardino County. The point of it all eludes me entirely. I suspect that for Lethem the principal purpose of the book was the distraction in writing it. It seems a possible therapeutic way to avoid thinking about the Trump-disaster. Quite apart from that it is disjointed, tedious, and irritating. Come to think of it, in a way not dissimilar to the Orange Wonder himself.
* Phoebe is an epithet if the mythical Artemis, goddess of the wilderness. A little irony, perhaps, on Lethem’s part. Or perhaps not; I doubt he put that much effort into the book.
A somewhat vacuous, somewhat lascivious thirty something wannabe journalist named Phoebe, goes adventuring in the Inland Empire of California, and that endless conurbation east of Los Angeles along the oddly named Christopher Columbus Transcontinental Highway. Her trip is an encounter with the void that is at the heart of her Conradian search for the missing daughter of a friend. Her companion and guide is Heist, the eponymous detective who, although distracted with nursing an opossum with a urinary tract issue, knows the territory.
The real spur to her mission is not her friendship with the girl’s mother but the election of Donald Trump. Such a topsy-turvey world obviously demands a Quixotic response. The opportunity was there, so hey - Karma. And the strangeness of Southern California to a New Yorker seemed just the right escapist therapy: “.. here in the Inland Empire, in this zone between, where I could no longer glimpse the world that was anyhow irretrievable.”
The thing about Southern California, of course, is that your average suburb can border on some pretty unconventional places. Orange County had both Richard Nixon and the Symbionese Liberation Army in close proximity. San Bernardino County, Lethem’s locus, is bigger than the state of New Jersey with dozens of wilderness areas butting up against its densely populated housing developments. So it’s only to be expected that some typical transitional types show up in fairly quick succession - tunnel-dwellers, off-grid communitarians engaged in tribal warfare, secretive Korean survivalists/lapis miners, and homicidal Buddhist carnival operators.
It is in one of these wildernesses that Lethem places his heart of darkness - a Zen monastery rumoured to be recently inhabited by Leonard Cohen, an idol of the missing girl, who has also taken to using the name Phoebe.* The monastery is one part of a parallel universe, an alternative non-civilisation which doesn’t even know who Donald Trump is much less care about his presidency. These are the hard core descendants of Californian hippiedom, still waiting for the apocalypse, ...“survivors of the catastrophe that hadn’t happened yet.”
As it turns out, the missing girl gets found, which leads on, like an old-fashioned Hopalong Cassidy Saturday matinee, to further adventures -sexual and criminal - among the murderous sub-cultures of San Bernardino County. The point of it all eludes me entirely. I suspect that for Lethem the principal purpose of the book was the distraction in writing it. It seems a possible therapeutic way to avoid thinking about the Trump-disaster. Quite apart from that it is disjointed, tedious, and irritating. Come to think of it, in a way not dissimilar to the Orange Wonder himself.
* Phoebe is an epithet if the mythical Artemis, goddess of the wilderness. A little irony, perhaps, on Lethem’s part. Or perhaps not; I doubt he put that much effort into the book.
July 16, 2021
This is greatly entertaining to read but the kind of novel that pushes up misgivings the more you think about it afterwards.
A dystopia in the midst of contemporary American life. Phoebe, our narrator, is a kind of semi-professional political reporter. (She's not convincing in this role but it's easy to ignore her biographical detail in the narrative.) She's no longer a teenager but appears to still be repeating the experiences of a teenager, to have yet to overcome them. Her best friend asks her to find her daughter Arabella who has gone missing. (Two very posh British names for American girls). The only clue to Arabella's whereabouts is her obsession with Leonard Cohen and the Buddhist retreat at the edge of the desert outside Los Angeles into which he vanished for six years. The trail soon leads Phoebe to "the feral detective". Charles Heist is known in the area for rescuing waifs and strays from the various cults in the desert. Together they venture into the desert. There are two cults here - the Rabbits and the Bears. The Rabbits are essentially female and peace loving; the Bears are macho and violent. What we have is a kind of cartoon version of the political rift in American society.
Two misgivings: the political allegory aspect of the novel can be too heavy handedly signposted and even veer towards the crass at times. The novel begins at the time of the Trump election victory and runs through to his inauguration. And Phoebe is way more irritating than she needs to be. Lethem ought to have softened some of her sharp grating edges. She's almost the antithesis of the loveable Lionel in Motherless Brooklyn. She thinks she's more cool than she is, more liberal too - vanities most of us share and which he could have made more of.
A dystopia in the midst of contemporary American life. Phoebe, our narrator, is a kind of semi-professional political reporter. (She's not convincing in this role but it's easy to ignore her biographical detail in the narrative.) She's no longer a teenager but appears to still be repeating the experiences of a teenager, to have yet to overcome them. Her best friend asks her to find her daughter Arabella who has gone missing. (Two very posh British names for American girls). The only clue to Arabella's whereabouts is her obsession with Leonard Cohen and the Buddhist retreat at the edge of the desert outside Los Angeles into which he vanished for six years. The trail soon leads Phoebe to "the feral detective". Charles Heist is known in the area for rescuing waifs and strays from the various cults in the desert. Together they venture into the desert. There are two cults here - the Rabbits and the Bears. The Rabbits are essentially female and peace loving; the Bears are macho and violent. What we have is a kind of cartoon version of the political rift in American society.
Two misgivings: the political allegory aspect of the novel can be too heavy handedly signposted and even veer towards the crass at times. The novel begins at the time of the Trump election victory and runs through to his inauguration. And Phoebe is way more irritating than she needs to be. Lethem ought to have softened some of her sharp grating edges. She's almost the antithesis of the loveable Lionel in Motherless Brooklyn. She thinks she's more cool than she is, more liberal too - vanities most of us share and which he could have made more of.
Read
December 5, 2018This book had some very good dogs.
April 2, 2025
A wonderful, offbeat potboiler of a novel, the plot centers around Phoebe- a 30 something former editor for "The NY Times" who goes off to Southwestern California to find her friend Roslyn's daughter, Arabella, who vanished after wanting to find herself in Leonard Cohen's skin.
Roslyn works for NPR, and Phoebe for "The NY Times"- and both are suffering the traumas of bougie existence, and the fact that Donald Trump has been elected President.
Phoebe finds herself enlisting the help of Charles Heist- a brooding, Dirty Harry type, with dark sideburns and a hairy body to help find the missing Arabella. It is Heist who is the feral detective- wild out in the desert, with his dogs, among groups of desert dwellers known as the Rabbits and the Bears.
Phoebe finds herself in a wild goose chase of self discovery and freedom with these feral communities, and realizes she has a feral part of herself deeply rooted in anger and disappointment at herself and her own country. Images of "Mad Max" and Westerns come to mind- and this book reminded me a lot of Lethem's own "Girl In Landscape"- another haunting book about loss starring a heroine trying to make sense of the world around her.
This is a wild romp in the desert that is one of his most nimble books. I have read that one of Mr. Lethem's favorite films is "The Searchers" and both "Girl in Landscape" and "The Feral Detective" have reminded me of that eternal John Wayne masterpiece.
Roslyn works for NPR, and Phoebe for "The NY Times"- and both are suffering the traumas of bougie existence, and the fact that Donald Trump has been elected President.
Phoebe finds herself enlisting the help of Charles Heist- a brooding, Dirty Harry type, with dark sideburns and a hairy body to help find the missing Arabella. It is Heist who is the feral detective- wild out in the desert, with his dogs, among groups of desert dwellers known as the Rabbits and the Bears.
Phoebe finds herself in a wild goose chase of self discovery and freedom with these feral communities, and realizes she has a feral part of herself deeply rooted in anger and disappointment at herself and her own country. Images of "Mad Max" and Westerns come to mind- and this book reminded me a lot of Lethem's own "Girl In Landscape"- another haunting book about loss starring a heroine trying to make sense of the world around her.
This is a wild romp in the desert that is one of his most nimble books. I have read that one of Mr. Lethem's favorite films is "The Searchers" and both "Girl in Landscape" and "The Feral Detective" have reminded me of that eternal John Wayne masterpiece.
November 6, 2018
“The Feral Detective” is a brilliant noir title — right down to its misdirection. Charles Heist, the mysterious man at the center of Jonathan Lethem’s new novel, is a detective of sorts, but he isn’t feral. He’s Clint Eastwood-cool, all self-contained and aloof, capable of silencing a room with a glance. His native wildness hasn’t been domesticated so much as chained. He also keeps a live opossum in his office, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
The good news is that Lethem is back in the PI game, and there is no bad news. “The Feral Detective” is one of his nimblest novels, a plucky voyage into the traumatized soul of the Trump era. Lethem is sleuthing around as he did almost 20 years ago in “Motherless Brooklyn,” but this time he’s 3,000 miles away from New York in the mountains of Southern California. The city that never sleeps has been replaced by the desert that never speaks, and his celebrated parody of hard-boiled detective fiction is now distilled to a clear amber spirit.
“The Feral Detective” is narrated by 30-something Phoebe Siegler, who quit the New York Times in a fit of rage over the election of Donald Trump. Regardless of the wisdom of that career move, Phoebe is now free to help an old friend who’s trying to locate her missing college-age daughter, Arabella. Knowing the young woman is a Leonard Cohen fanatic, Phoebe suspects that Arabella has gone to the Mount Baldy Zen Center outside Los Angeles, where Cohen. . . .
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...
The good news is that Lethem is back in the PI game, and there is no bad news. “The Feral Detective” is one of his nimblest novels, a plucky voyage into the traumatized soul of the Trump era. Lethem is sleuthing around as he did almost 20 years ago in “Motherless Brooklyn,” but this time he’s 3,000 miles away from New York in the mountains of Southern California. The city that never sleeps has been replaced by the desert that never speaks, and his celebrated parody of hard-boiled detective fiction is now distilled to a clear amber spirit.
“The Feral Detective” is narrated by 30-something Phoebe Siegler, who quit the New York Times in a fit of rage over the election of Donald Trump. Regardless of the wisdom of that career move, Phoebe is now free to help an old friend who’s trying to locate her missing college-age daughter, Arabella. Knowing the young woman is a Leonard Cohen fanatic, Phoebe suspects that Arabella has gone to the Mount Baldy Zen Center outside Los Angeles, where Cohen. . . .
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...
July 15, 2018
An entertaining read but felt the characters and scenarios felt contrived. When a male author writes in the voice of a female protagonist I try to keep that out of my mind and to not read the book through that lens, to be open to the character's and author's voices. But throughout this book I couldn't help but have that awareness of Phoebe being a woman written by a man. The intermittent insertion of the 2016 election into her internal narrative/journey took me further outside of the story and of a sense of Phoebe as a person as opposed to a two-dimensional representation. It's like she's going through the motions of a standard ditching-societal-convention-finding-yourself narrative arc. I enjoy Lethem's prose and it was a quick read, but I couldn't connect with the book.
February 16, 2025
Lethem returns to the detective genre nearly 20 years after the brilliant Motherless Brooklyn. Here, he swaps the bustling streets of New York and sleuths around the sprawled out desert and mountainous areas east of Los Angeles, with the Inauguration of President Trump rumbling away in the background. Also, we get a female narrator instead of a male one. When a male writer narrates a female character I'm always left feeling that something is going to be missing over that of a female writer. But I have to say, Lethem works wonders with Phoebe Siegler, who is sharp and sassy and not afraid to make her feelings clear - whether she is scared shitless or overcome with lust. This is not as good as Motherless Brooklyn in its complexity, but it's way more weird and quirky when thinking of some of the bizarre moments had out in the Mojave, and the two tribes of survivalists living well off the grid, out in the void. It's a nuts & bolts 'find the girl who has gone missing' type deal, but Lethem isn't someone who rips off the likes of Chandler and others in his approach. The biggest complement I can give The Feral Detective is that it truly does feel like something completely different in the detective genre. Unfortunately, this also comes with a downside, as it did tend to get too ridiculous in places. Also, to pull off being serious (this is a darker novel than MB), wisecracking and comic, is not easy to do well in a novel. And the tone here felt all over the place at times. So, a messy novel then, but still one I enjoyed. Thanks mainly to the ever so likeable Phoebe Siegler. Don't think I would have liked it as much had the private eye Charles Heist narrated. Speaking of which, I don't get why the Feral detective. There really wasn't anything feral about him.
November 23, 2018
I generally love Jonathan Lethem: Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude are two of my most favorite books. I also really, really liked Dissident Gardens. So I hoped to like this in the same way. Which I didn't. But it may have suffered from the comparison.
Phoebe Siegler is a New York City girl who has had it with the life of an editorial assistant/intellectual. She heads west to Los Angeles to locate the disappeared daughter of her best friend. She has been led to Charlie Heist, the title's Feral Detective.
The book has an hallucinatory quality that propelled me through it. The desert and its wildness, the untamed somewhat insane denizens, the nightmarish events are unlikely but feel inevitable. An echo of the new election and the country's descent into that nightmare.
Lethem is at his best in capturing the traumatized reaction of the non-supporters of a devastating election, the best I've read so far.
Although the characters are two-dimensional, it feels as though that is a choice on the author's part. Everyone is an actor in some larger drama or dream.
3.5 rounded up to 4 for its compelling (for me, anyway) quality.
Phoebe Siegler is a New York City girl who has had it with the life of an editorial assistant/intellectual. She heads west to Los Angeles to locate the disappeared daughter of her best friend. She has been led to Charlie Heist, the title's Feral Detective.
The book has an hallucinatory quality that propelled me through it. The desert and its wildness, the untamed somewhat insane denizens, the nightmarish events are unlikely but feel inevitable. An echo of the new election and the country's descent into that nightmare.
Lethem is at his best in capturing the traumatized reaction of the non-supporters of a devastating election, the best I've read so far.
Although the characters are two-dimensional, it feels as though that is a choice on the author's part. Everyone is an actor in some larger drama or dream.
3.5 rounded up to 4 for its compelling (for me, anyway) quality.
April 11, 2025
Knew right off the bat that I was going to hate and hate myself if I finished it. So DNF'd it before I even got 20 pages (DNFd at 17).
November 19, 2018
I am trying to be nice, but just didn't like this book. From the political commentary, to the Rabbits and Bears, it seemed more like a child's book, except for the sex, which made the female lead character look like a school girl with a crush. Started like a detective noir, but ended with a thud.
July 21, 2021
I enjoyed this novel even if it's received its share of so-so reviews from a number of hot shot professional critics.
Lots of post-Trump election angst-riddled rants delivered in a first person narrative by a character of the female persuasion - a Brooklynite who quits her entry-level journalist gig in an act of dumb-ass defiance and vacuous protest against the outcome of the 2016 election.
We have mostly all suffered through these days o'Trump, taking them one outrageous day at a time. The lead character in this novel is just a bit more unnerved than most.
Things improve when her best friend (her former supervisor when she was employed at NPR) who's also allowing her to crib out in her Cobble Hill duplex asks her to fly to California and engage the services of a sort-of-private-investigator whose specialty is retrieving runaway kids. The lead character's friend has a daughter who has disappeared into what will eventually turn out to be a cult of end-times desert rats and apocalypto neo-hippies.
The novel has the sort of suspense, violence, and mystery you might associate with Thomas Perry or Boston Teran. Stiff breezes of sophisticated humor provide levity -whether or not it's required to ease the tension I can't say.
I found it distracting.
I enjoyed this novel.
Recommended but if it's a choice between this book or a bottle of cheap, sparkling wine and an old 1940s film on TCM, go with the cheap booze and TCM.
Lots of post-Trump election angst-riddled rants delivered in a first person narrative by a character of the female persuasion - a Brooklynite who quits her entry-level journalist gig in an act of dumb-ass defiance and vacuous protest against the outcome of the 2016 election.
We have mostly all suffered through these days o'Trump, taking them one outrageous day at a time. The lead character in this novel is just a bit more unnerved than most.
Things improve when her best friend (her former supervisor when she was employed at NPR) who's also allowing her to crib out in her Cobble Hill duplex asks her to fly to California and engage the services of a sort-of-private-investigator whose specialty is retrieving runaway kids. The lead character's friend has a daughter who has disappeared into what will eventually turn out to be a cult of end-times desert rats and apocalypto neo-hippies.
The novel has the sort of suspense, violence, and mystery you might associate with Thomas Perry or Boston Teran. Stiff breezes of sophisticated humor provide levity -whether or not it's required to ease the tension I can't say.
I found it distracting.
I enjoyed this novel.
Recommended but if it's a choice between this book or a bottle of cheap, sparkling wine and an old 1940s film on TCM, go with the cheap booze and TCM.
July 29, 2018
There was a stretch of time that opening a Jonathan Lethem book was akin to discovering a new room inside my own brain. Perhaps this was in part due to shared geography (Oakland/Berkeley/Bay Area, Brooklyn), though just as much of his approach of bridging genres or layering the fantastical on top of our realities. (My mind is racing through so many of his worlds including the one where the poorest people live in their cars caught in an infinite traffic jam or that love triangle with the man, the woman and the void.) In his most recent books, I have caught sparks of brilliance, but by the whole work did not meld/morph with my mind.
And now we stand with The Feral Detective, which travels through new shared geographies in the high desert of California, a place I have visited at least annually for 14 years. The timeframe of the story is also one that sticks in my mind, the traumatic days of Our Dear Leader ascending into power to wreak American carnage on everyone. My mind has caught up and tortured by the minute-by-minute refresh of horrors brought on with a [redacted] man and his kakistocracy. In this time and place, my mind has been searching for a word or phrase to name and contain this MAGA-hate-shit. I did not find that word/phrase/container in Michael Wolff's sensational exploration of the Trump-storm. I skipped Comey's book...as I'm getting tired of putting myself in the position of picking at scabs that are just starting the healing process. Improbably, Lethem's book did a part of this work to name/contain our dark present world. I'm not sure why it had this effect, but it did. ("Great. Excellent. Let's examine everything from the Bear perspective. It trumps anything I could possibly say. I hate how that word is ruined, among so many other ruined things.")
You cannot even get the book yet, so I don't want to give too much away. (Thanks to my local book store for giving me their Advance Reader copy. You should all buy this book at an *independent* bookstore when it is available in November 2018.) I will say that it is a mystery...and coming from Jonathan Lethem, it is also not exactly a mystery. Perhaps it is a fable. Or a zen mystery...a zen-Leonard-Cohen.
There are weaknesses here--chief among them, that Lethem's narrator often feels like the-idea-of-a-woman-as-written-by-a-man rather than a woman. As a man, perhaps, I am not the right person to accurately judge this. (Though this is a nice semi-related sentence from the book: "Well, on the one hand there's mansplaining, and on the other, there's the sound of a woman quoting the mansplaining to another woman.")
Beyond the political sphere, the book also captures my sense of loss for the world of the high desert. ("What I like about the desert people is that it's the only place you can have an honest conversation about the apocalypse. That's as true of the guy at the gas station on Twentynine Palms as any of us way out here.") The high desert area (Joshua Tree, Yucca Valley, Pioneertown) has radically changed in the years since I first visited. It is gentrification, but it's beyond gentrification...and a key book-ending epiphany directly speaks to this. Again, Lethem gave voice to help name a question that has been forming in my head. There isn't an answer, but I'm starting to see the word...and that word is--again, very improbably--this book.
"So we fell into silence again, our headlights illuminating a tunnel through yellow dusk, our treads crossing and recrossing palimpsests of the vehicles that had gone this way, whether an hour or a month before I couldn't tell."
In our present mad world, I'm thankful to have a chance to examine a few more rooms in my own mind. I'm glad that once again, Jonathan Lethem is my guide.
And now we stand with The Feral Detective, which travels through new shared geographies in the high desert of California, a place I have visited at least annually for 14 years. The timeframe of the story is also one that sticks in my mind, the traumatic days of Our Dear Leader ascending into power to wreak American carnage on everyone. My mind has caught up and tortured by the minute-by-minute refresh of horrors brought on with a [redacted] man and his kakistocracy. In this time and place, my mind has been searching for a word or phrase to name and contain this MAGA-hate-shit. I did not find that word/phrase/container in Michael Wolff's sensational exploration of the Trump-storm. I skipped Comey's book...as I'm getting tired of putting myself in the position of picking at scabs that are just starting the healing process. Improbably, Lethem's book did a part of this work to name/contain our dark present world. I'm not sure why it had this effect, but it did. ("Great. Excellent. Let's examine everything from the Bear perspective. It trumps anything I could possibly say. I hate how that word is ruined, among so many other ruined things.")
You cannot even get the book yet, so I don't want to give too much away. (Thanks to my local book store for giving me their Advance Reader copy. You should all buy this book at an *independent* bookstore when it is available in November 2018.) I will say that it is a mystery...and coming from Jonathan Lethem, it is also not exactly a mystery. Perhaps it is a fable. Or a zen mystery...a zen-Leonard-Cohen.
There are weaknesses here--chief among them, that Lethem's narrator often feels like the-idea-of-a-woman-as-written-by-a-man rather than a woman. As a man, perhaps, I am not the right person to accurately judge this. (Though this is a nice semi-related sentence from the book: "Well, on the one hand there's mansplaining, and on the other, there's the sound of a woman quoting the mansplaining to another woman.")
Beyond the political sphere, the book also captures my sense of loss for the world of the high desert. ("What I like about the desert people is that it's the only place you can have an honest conversation about the apocalypse. That's as true of the guy at the gas station on Twentynine Palms as any of us way out here.") The high desert area (Joshua Tree, Yucca Valley, Pioneertown) has radically changed in the years since I first visited. It is gentrification, but it's beyond gentrification...and a key book-ending epiphany directly speaks to this. Again, Lethem gave voice to help name a question that has been forming in my head. There isn't an answer, but I'm starting to see the word...and that word is--again, very improbably--this book.
"So we fell into silence again, our headlights illuminating a tunnel through yellow dusk, our treads crossing and recrossing palimpsests of the vehicles that had gone this way, whether an hour or a month before I couldn't tell."
In our present mad world, I'm thankful to have a chance to examine a few more rooms in my own mind. I'm glad that once again, Jonathan Lethem is my guide.
November 17, 2018
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 detective.
Their search takes them to the mountain and a horrific murder as well as to the desert 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. I think as obvious as it seems, seeing them as America's rival tribes is a mistake.
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.wordpre...
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 detective.
Their search takes them to the mountain and a horrific murder as well as to the desert 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. I think as obvious as it seems, seeing them as America's rival tribes is a mistake.
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.wordpre...
December 27, 2021
Lethem follows the stellar bruiser A Gambler’s Anatomy with this mirthless stinker. The problems are many and obvious. The first, Lethem’s writing from a female POV in the first person. The protagonist’s voice simply veers across the page with the knock-kneed misaplomb of a pissed-up aunt making a beeline for the quiche at a cousin’s wake, mixing badly mishandled faux-Fleabag sass with Lethemian stylistic flurries. Second, heaped upon this wince-inducing narrative voice is a plot so showily incoherent, insane, and irritating that trying to follow the madcap antics from page to page is really only recommended for readers whose heads resemble Bond of Union by M.C. Escher in a blender. Spinning multiple plates of surreal and frenetic plot lunacy is usually Lethem’s forte, in this one the plates very speedily shatter. Lastly, the novel painfully strives to shoehorn topicality, with pointless Trump references and frequent insertions of conspiratorial hip-shit like contrails. It’s a violently nonsensical mess, easily the worst novel in Lethem’s otherwise consistently zaftig canon.
May 16, 2023
07/2020
I really enjoyed this. My one complaint is the endless dragged out ending. This isn't a hundred years ago. End on a high point, end!
I really enjoyed this. My one complaint is the endless dragged out ending. This isn't a hundred years ago. End on a high point, end!
November 21, 2018
Highest recommendation for this fever dream of a novel. Any purchase or perspective on the sense of unreality felt after the election of 2016, from the shock that millions of American adults were willing to trade the ideals of democracy for putting themselves First requires the deep dive this novel offers.
“Television had elected itself, I figured. It could watch itself too, for all I cared. I read my book.”
“I didn’t want to have to rescue myself” is a sentiment among many I share with protagonist Phoebe Siegler. This classic New Yorker, hip, funny and irreverent finds herself in LA and quickly realizes, “to go east from the sea was to go deeper into the west”. That cowboy, violence-soaked lone wolf territory so central to our national self myth, yet opposed to to our global ideal of the City on a Hill is right there waiting, just outside the city where the lanes shrink from six wide to a ribbon if highway to a dirt road and beyond.
“Ordinary people might be the most terrifying thing on earth. Or ordinary Americans, I should say.” On tv she sees who I picture as Lindsay Graham, “a baby faced senator smirked and stonewalled around the implications of his lifetime’s jolly bigotry.” Phoebe is diving in. Afraid? Often yes, but unwilling to look away, to not be involved. “My fears were themselves rooted in a stark appetite for something unnameable but real.”
“To be feral wasn’t merely to be a wild child, but to be one cut loose, or run loose, from some point of origin.”
Jonathan Lethem’s new novel along with fellow New Yorker Gary Shteyngart’s Lake Success are the best novels I’ve read from our new era. “It trumps anything I can possibly say. I hate how that word is ruined, among so many other ruined things.”
“Television had elected itself, I figured. It could watch itself too, for all I cared. I read my book.”
“I didn’t want to have to rescue myself” is a sentiment among many I share with protagonist Phoebe Siegler. This classic New Yorker, hip, funny and irreverent finds herself in LA and quickly realizes, “to go east from the sea was to go deeper into the west”. That cowboy, violence-soaked lone wolf territory so central to our national self myth, yet opposed to to our global ideal of the City on a Hill is right there waiting, just outside the city where the lanes shrink from six wide to a ribbon if highway to a dirt road and beyond.
“Ordinary people might be the most terrifying thing on earth. Or ordinary Americans, I should say.” On tv she sees who I picture as Lindsay Graham, “a baby faced senator smirked and stonewalled around the implications of his lifetime’s jolly bigotry.” Phoebe is diving in. Afraid? Often yes, but unwilling to look away, to not be involved. “My fears were themselves rooted in a stark appetite for something unnameable but real.”
“To be feral wasn’t merely to be a wild child, but to be one cut loose, or run loose, from some point of origin.”
Jonathan Lethem’s new novel along with fellow New Yorker Gary Shteyngart’s Lake Success are the best novels I’ve read from our new era. “It trumps anything I can possibly say. I hate how that word is ruined, among so many other ruined things.”
November 24, 2018
I only read 1/3 of the book. I had to give it up because I disliked the characters so much, and the plot was icky, icky, icky.
May 4, 2018
What to make of this novel ? I've enjoyed all the previous Lethem books but this one leaves me cold, bored and asking whatever was he thinking.
Starting out as a mystery of sorts, it soon regressed into a sort of love story. I finished it but not sure why.
Starting out as a mystery of sorts, it soon regressed into a sort of love story. I finished it but not sure why.
April 3, 2019
Unfortunately I’d added this book to my library hold list before consulting a close friend of mine and finding out his opinion of the book was that it was awful. Luckily I didn’t buy it based on this information, and instead found that it was auto checked out for me on my library hold some months later. Needless to say, he was correct. This was a real piece of shit. Enough said.
August 1, 2019
The feral detective
Il Detective selvaggio del titolo mi ha completamente portato fuori strada !
qua non c'è nessun detective alla Bolaño , proprio no!
E' un poliziesco strampalato ,sullo sfondo l'america trumpizzata , con una trama confusa , dialoghi imbarazzanti , scene che dovrebbero essere adrenaliniche e sono un'accozzaglia poco credibile di situazioni ibride tra fast&furious e qualche videogioco
Il detective ha le physique du rôle di Sébastien Chabal ,il possente e rude giocatore di rugby francese
La protagonista femminile Phoebe è sul genere Samantha di Sex and the City - e ho detto tutto.(!)
Testadipazzo di Lethem dovevo leggere, altro che
Il Detective selvaggio del titolo mi ha completamente portato fuori strada !
qua non c'è nessun detective alla Bolaño , proprio no!
E' un poliziesco strampalato ,sullo sfondo l'america trumpizzata , con una trama confusa , dialoghi imbarazzanti , scene che dovrebbero essere adrenaliniche e sono un'accozzaglia poco credibile di situazioni ibride tra fast&furious e qualche videogioco
Il detective ha le physique du rôle di Sébastien Chabal ,il possente e rude giocatore di rugby francese
La protagonista femminile Phoebe è sul genere Samantha di Sex and the City - e ho detto tutto.(!)
Testadipazzo di Lethem dovevo leggere, altro che
November 21, 2018
(3 1/2). I can't quite put my finger on what really tickled my fancy about this book. Could it be that Phoebe is such a cool, sort of protagonist? Is it that Charles Heist is almost an anti-protagonist, the ultimate mystery man? Is it the setting in a part of the California desert that I am very familiar with? It is the 60's cult thing going on that hits my imagination? is it the anti-Trump fervor that drives Phoebe? Probably some of all of this, but Lethem's style is so easy to read and this book flows along so nicely I felt it really worked. A different deal. Really good fun.
January 23, 2020
Some thoughts:
For someone who seems to really despise Trump, Lethem wrote a whole book that seems inspired by his election, and none of it is funny or insightful or scathing...Even though it desperately wants to be.
Because of how unabashedly political and setting specific (2016-2017) this book is, I think it will age like butter milk.
I often tell students in my Modern Novel class to give books a shot, but don’t commit to them if you hate them. 50-100 pages ought to tell you what you need to know. Life is too short, reading novels is also about taking pleasure in the practice. So why in the hell did I keep reading this?
The Wall of The Sky, The Wall of the Eye is an incredible short story collection. Read that instead of this.
December 10, 2018
As I read this I kept finding that my face was twisted into an expression of WTF. I just could not figure out why anyone was doing what they were doing. I didn't really like or dislike these people, I just didn't get them. Except for the feelings of loss, anger and astonishment at the election results of 2016, that I totally understood.
November 16, 2018
This book started out as intriguing and fun, also quirky and a bit different.
However I just couldn't relate to the protagonist Phoebe. I found her really annoying and couldn't see why there was any chemistry between her and Charles Heist.
I did complete it but it was really hard work :(
However I just couldn't relate to the protagonist Phoebe. I found her really annoying and couldn't see why there was any chemistry between her and Charles Heist.
I did complete it but it was really hard work :(
May 17, 2020
I’m re-reading this one as the last novel in my 21st Century fiction class, and I have again enjoyed and admired it. My students, a little less/
I’ve read most of Lethem’s novels by this point, and he was at the top of my list of favorite writers for a long time. This is the second time I’ve taught one of my favorites of his, though, and it’s the second time my students haven’t loved it.
I think the issue is that he is so heavily ironic, so self-consciously post-modern at the same time as he undermines the possibility of taking a term like “post-modern seriously,” that it’s difficult to find solid footing for analysis.
And I think that may be true of this novel even more than the others.
I wanted this in the class because, as one of the blurbs puts it, this is the first substantial fiction I know conceived, written, and published in the Trump era. At one level, it is a protest novel, an attempt to critique a world that seems so radically changed from 3.5 years ago. Our protagonist, Phoebe, is so offended by the results of the election that she quits her job at the New York Times. And then, since she’s unemployed, she agrees to go in search of the daughter of a friend who has vanished into the western desert.
We see Trump’s victory through Phoebe’s ironic eyes, but we gradually get a different perspective as well. She acknowledges from the start that she lived in a bubble in New York City. Over time, she loses the irony of that belief and seems sincerely to recognize the limits of her perspective.
At the same time, Lethem never gives her anything “real” to replace what she comes to realize was an illusion. In other words, she replaces a shallow irony with a deeper irony, but she never gets toward ultimate substance. As one of my students put it, it’s “unsettling.” Lethem doesn’t do happy endings even when he allows his characters to end with some of what they thought they wanted.
I came into this one wanting to see it in light of what Harry Frankfurt says about “bullshit.” That is, as pernicious as lying is, it still depends on an awareness that there is a truth that the lie misrepresents. Bullshit, in contrast, is the deliberate and sustained effort of saying nothing, of undermining the power of language to tell us either the truth or the lie.
That approach is item number one in the Trump playbook, of course. It’s the philosophy that underlies his shouts of “fake news.” He knows he won’t succeed in making most people see the world as he does, but he counts on sowing doubt on all media. His news has selected pieces of truth mixed in with untruths, and he implies that everyone else’s does as well. If nothing is entirely true and nothing entirely false, then everything is bullshit.
As I read this particular Lethem, then, it’s a meditation on bullshit, a story about the experience of living in a world where we’ve diminished our capacity for the truth. For Trump, that means we’re left listening to the man with the biggest microphone…or the most Twitter followers.
The rest of us aren’t in a much more solid place, though, and that seems to be Lethem’s biggest concern. In retrospect, we can see the limits of our “bubbles,” but we cannot see – at least not right now – a way to live outside them. We’re confronted with a world where everything might be bullshit, and then Lethem hits us with the irony that even that insight is, well, bullshit.
My students found all that depressing, and I suppose it is. But I also believe that Lethem’s capacity to dramatize that irony is ultimately inspiring. He manages a clear vision in a time when we’re so swamped with irony, cynicism, an bullshit that it’s easy to give in.
Lethem refuses to give in, and I admire what he’s done here.
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Original review from Aug. 2019
I have been so bewildered by the nature of our historical moment, that I find myself reading a lot of things as allegory for our contemporary America. I find Trump-analogues in all sorts of places, sometimes taking comfort in the sense that we’ve survived such deep narcissism and greed before and sometimes horrified with the sense that what see today is a distillation of much that has long threatened us. Sometimes those comparisons are there, at least if you squint, and sometimes I know I’m just imagining them.
This is a novel that asks us to read it as an allegory of Trump’s moment. On the day of his inauguration, Phoebe quits her job at a liberal New York publication in order to find, well, something. She’s aware of being caught in a kind of bubble, aware that there’s a larger America that may as well be an apocalyptic wilderness for all she knows of it.
Then, when a friend’s young adult daughter goes missing in the wilds of California, she volunteers to try to find her in that hard-to-imagine space.
In an irony that the deeply gifted Lethem must surely intend, those wilds turn out indeed to be an apocalyptic wasteland. Arabella has found her way to a community divided between the diminished intellectual and cultural descendants of a pair of one-time counter-culture communes. The “wolves” are all male and live in a kind of Mad Max society, willing to murder for their beliefs and recognizing as chief the man who can kill the last chief. The “rabbits” are mostly women, and they maintain a gatherer kind of lifestyle that resists the wolves as well as most technology and culture of the last couple decades.
Pheobe’s guide through this alternative America is Charles Heist, the feral detective of the title. He’s a child of both the wolves and the rabbits, a man who, without knowing his particular parents, was raised in both tribes and now commits himself to protecting any who unwittingly fall into their struggles. She falls in love with him in a New-York kind of way, seeing him as just another hook-up. He may or may not fall in love back, but if he does it’s in cowboy fashion: deep but humorless, a love without guile and accepting affection as implicit promise.
The mystery at the heart of the novel gets pretty tangled, even lost, which amplifies the political confusion at the heart of it as well. Phoebe has needed to escape her New York bubble, but she hasn’t exactly found enlightenment in the harrowing world she discovers. She becomes tougher, and she becomes someone capable of an uncynical love, but she also never quite stops flirting with the possibility of turning her adventures into a New York Review of Books style expose of that “other America.”
I say admiringly that I’m not sure what Lethem is trying in the end to show us about Trumpism. On the one hand, it’s tempting to read this in the context of Lethem’s own notorious move from the NYC he chronicled perhaps better than anyone of his generation in Fortress of Solitude, Chronic City, Motherless Brooklyn, and Dissident Gardens. That accounts for some of the fatigue with New-York-as-America’s-cultural-capital that’s out front here.
On the other, Lethem seems to be exploring a larger zeitgeist in the way that only the most daring of our novelists can. Much of Chronic City’s brilliance comes from the way it refuses to give us a stable foothold; everything there is caught in a cannabis haze. In similar but not quite so successful fashion here, everything is coated in a post-truth patina. The characters’ separate truths threaten always to become separate realities. It’s no spoiler to say that we never really know whether Phoebe has discovered happiness or whether she’s simply given way to Charles’s and the West’s rural delusion.
I don’t feel any less confused by our American moment after reading this, and I don’t think Lethem has any bullet-point insight to help with our cultural clarity, but – in a consoling way – I don’t feel quite so alone in my bewilderment. This may be a great novel, and it may be something that turns out to be a confusing trifle. I don’t think we’ll know until (and may it happen soon) we have a new President and enough historical perspective to make fuller sense of what we’re experiencing.
For most of the last decade, I thought of Lethem as my single favorite working writer. (That may be a surprise to people who know me as a big fan of Philip Roth, but it was a new Lethem that really got me.) Then I was disappointed after teaching Chronic City that so many of my students didn’t seem to appreciate it. And then came his last novel, A Gambler’s Anatomy. For the first time, I saw Lethem as uninspired, as a writer just going through the paces. It had moments that may have clicked, but it felt like his jump-the-shark moment, and I came close to giving up on him as a real talent. (And I transferred my favorite working novelist title to Richard Flanagan.)
This one gives me hope. It’s weird and ambitious, and I think it might some day be one worthy of standing next to the really excellent work that Lethem has done.
I’ve read most of Lethem’s novels by this point, and he was at the top of my list of favorite writers for a long time. This is the second time I’ve taught one of my favorites of his, though, and it’s the second time my students haven’t loved it.
I think the issue is that he is so heavily ironic, so self-consciously post-modern at the same time as he undermines the possibility of taking a term like “post-modern seriously,” that it’s difficult to find solid footing for analysis.
And I think that may be true of this novel even more than the others.
I wanted this in the class because, as one of the blurbs puts it, this is the first substantial fiction I know conceived, written, and published in the Trump era. At one level, it is a protest novel, an attempt to critique a world that seems so radically changed from 3.5 years ago. Our protagonist, Phoebe, is so offended by the results of the election that she quits her job at the New York Times. And then, since she’s unemployed, she agrees to go in search of the daughter of a friend who has vanished into the western desert.
We see Trump’s victory through Phoebe’s ironic eyes, but we gradually get a different perspective as well. She acknowledges from the start that she lived in a bubble in New York City. Over time, she loses the irony of that belief and seems sincerely to recognize the limits of her perspective.
At the same time, Lethem never gives her anything “real” to replace what she comes to realize was an illusion. In other words, she replaces a shallow irony with a deeper irony, but she never gets toward ultimate substance. As one of my students put it, it’s “unsettling.” Lethem doesn’t do happy endings even when he allows his characters to end with some of what they thought they wanted.
I came into this one wanting to see it in light of what Harry Frankfurt says about “bullshit.” That is, as pernicious as lying is, it still depends on an awareness that there is a truth that the lie misrepresents. Bullshit, in contrast, is the deliberate and sustained effort of saying nothing, of undermining the power of language to tell us either the truth or the lie.
That approach is item number one in the Trump playbook, of course. It’s the philosophy that underlies his shouts of “fake news.” He knows he won’t succeed in making most people see the world as he does, but he counts on sowing doubt on all media. His news has selected pieces of truth mixed in with untruths, and he implies that everyone else’s does as well. If nothing is entirely true and nothing entirely false, then everything is bullshit.
As I read this particular Lethem, then, it’s a meditation on bullshit, a story about the experience of living in a world where we’ve diminished our capacity for the truth. For Trump, that means we’re left listening to the man with the biggest microphone…or the most Twitter followers.
The rest of us aren’t in a much more solid place, though, and that seems to be Lethem’s biggest concern. In retrospect, we can see the limits of our “bubbles,” but we cannot see – at least not right now – a way to live outside them. We’re confronted with a world where everything might be bullshit, and then Lethem hits us with the irony that even that insight is, well, bullshit.
My students found all that depressing, and I suppose it is. But I also believe that Lethem’s capacity to dramatize that irony is ultimately inspiring. He manages a clear vision in a time when we’re so swamped with irony, cynicism, an bullshit that it’s easy to give in.
Lethem refuses to give in, and I admire what he’s done here.
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Original review from Aug. 2019
I have been so bewildered by the nature of our historical moment, that I find myself reading a lot of things as allegory for our contemporary America. I find Trump-analogues in all sorts of places, sometimes taking comfort in the sense that we’ve survived such deep narcissism and greed before and sometimes horrified with the sense that what see today is a distillation of much that has long threatened us. Sometimes those comparisons are there, at least if you squint, and sometimes I know I’m just imagining them.
This is a novel that asks us to read it as an allegory of Trump’s moment. On the day of his inauguration, Phoebe quits her job at a liberal New York publication in order to find, well, something. She’s aware of being caught in a kind of bubble, aware that there’s a larger America that may as well be an apocalyptic wilderness for all she knows of it.
Then, when a friend’s young adult daughter goes missing in the wilds of California, she volunteers to try to find her in that hard-to-imagine space.
In an irony that the deeply gifted Lethem must surely intend, those wilds turn out indeed to be an apocalyptic wasteland. Arabella has found her way to a community divided between the diminished intellectual and cultural descendants of a pair of one-time counter-culture communes. The “wolves” are all male and live in a kind of Mad Max society, willing to murder for their beliefs and recognizing as chief the man who can kill the last chief. The “rabbits” are mostly women, and they maintain a gatherer kind of lifestyle that resists the wolves as well as most technology and culture of the last couple decades.
Pheobe’s guide through this alternative America is Charles Heist, the feral detective of the title. He’s a child of both the wolves and the rabbits, a man who, without knowing his particular parents, was raised in both tribes and now commits himself to protecting any who unwittingly fall into their struggles. She falls in love with him in a New-York kind of way, seeing him as just another hook-up. He may or may not fall in love back, but if he does it’s in cowboy fashion: deep but humorless, a love without guile and accepting affection as implicit promise.
The mystery at the heart of the novel gets pretty tangled, even lost, which amplifies the political confusion at the heart of it as well. Phoebe has needed to escape her New York bubble, but she hasn’t exactly found enlightenment in the harrowing world she discovers. She becomes tougher, and she becomes someone capable of an uncynical love, but she also never quite stops flirting with the possibility of turning her adventures into a New York Review of Books style expose of that “other America.”
I say admiringly that I’m not sure what Lethem is trying in the end to show us about Trumpism. On the one hand, it’s tempting to read this in the context of Lethem’s own notorious move from the NYC he chronicled perhaps better than anyone of his generation in Fortress of Solitude, Chronic City, Motherless Brooklyn, and Dissident Gardens. That accounts for some of the fatigue with New-York-as-America’s-cultural-capital that’s out front here.
On the other, Lethem seems to be exploring a larger zeitgeist in the way that only the most daring of our novelists can. Much of Chronic City’s brilliance comes from the way it refuses to give us a stable foothold; everything there is caught in a cannabis haze. In similar but not quite so successful fashion here, everything is coated in a post-truth patina. The characters’ separate truths threaten always to become separate realities. It’s no spoiler to say that we never really know whether Phoebe has discovered happiness or whether she’s simply given way to Charles’s and the West’s rural delusion.
I don’t feel any less confused by our American moment after reading this, and I don’t think Lethem has any bullet-point insight to help with our cultural clarity, but – in a consoling way – I don’t feel quite so alone in my bewilderment. This may be a great novel, and it may be something that turns out to be a confusing trifle. I don’t think we’ll know until (and may it happen soon) we have a new President and enough historical perspective to make fuller sense of what we’re experiencing.
For most of the last decade, I thought of Lethem as my single favorite working writer. (That may be a surprise to people who know me as a big fan of Philip Roth, but it was a new Lethem that really got me.) Then I was disappointed after teaching Chronic City that so many of my students didn’t seem to appreciate it. And then came his last novel, A Gambler’s Anatomy. For the first time, I saw Lethem as uninspired, as a writer just going through the paces. It had moments that may have clicked, but it felt like his jump-the-shark moment, and I came close to giving up on him as a real talent. (And I transferred my favorite working novelist title to Richard Flanagan.)
This one gives me hope. It’s weird and ambitious, and I think it might some day be one worthy of standing next to the really excellent work that Lethem has done.
September 26, 2019
Have you ever watched someone perform an amazing feat only to then wonder why on earth they'd choose to do it? I'm talking about the kid on YouTube who successfully juggles fifteen cereal boxes in the air, somehow managing to get a few bits from each one in his mouth, spits them up into a bowl and then shows you a perfectly-arranged mixture of fifteen different cereal brands? Or the guy who shows up on a local TV morning show and can recite the entire works of Tolstoy backwards in German while on a unicycle? It's that sense of, "Wow, this person has done something amazing! Phenomenal! Super . . . wait, why did they do that? With all that talent, why did they use it just to be weird?"
That's how I came away from reading The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem, a fabulously-written pseudo detective story that I doubt fans of detective stories will ever want to read.
Let me start by giving the simple, hooky description of the book: The Feral Detective is a noir mystery in which the protagonist is the client rather than the private investigator.
Easy, right?
Phoebe Siegler is a woman on a mission: to find the missing daughter of her best friend Rosalyn. Or maybe she's just trying to escape her suffocating and mundane New York life. Unless of course she's really just having a slow-moving nervous breakdown over the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. Presidency. All three are true, all three are fascinating in different ways. The combination feels oddly resonant – as if Lethem is showing us the otherwise inexplicable and largely indefensible inner algorithms behind our own actions. We think we're acting for noble reasons, but underneath, we're just launching ourselves into whatever bizarre experiences will simultaneously drug us out of our pain and give us the amusing anecdotes we need to construct a plausible explanation for how we got there.
Notice how I started with a pretty saleable premise: a detective story in which the client is the protagonist, and then pretty quickly got somewhere weird enough that you're not sure what's going on with this book?
What's going on is a lot of brilliant writing. Lethem gives the first-person narration a noir feel without cribbing his descriptive passages from the 1930's and 40's masters, instead giving Phoebe her own noir voice that's contemporary, credible, and vivid. The book's also compulsively readable: short chapters, fun characters, and a plot that isn't afraid to take you out into the desert to visit weird ex-hippy tribes who may or not be raiding each other, committing murders, and looking for a new king to rule them.
Where the book challenges the reader is in the way it not only subverts mystery and thriller tropes but actively revels in using them to deny you the satisfaction those tropes usually bring. You never, not for a second, get that sense of justice being restored. What's even stranger is that it's not as if Lethem's written one of those ponderously ambiguous "I'm going to deny you any real answers and leave the reader unsettled" books that only those writers who deem the genre beneath them (yet want the money it generates) choose to produce once in a while. Lethem really does give you the answers, the big action sequences, the love scenes, the punch-ups. He just does it in a way that leaves you wondering if any of it meant anything at all, or if – in an age where Donald Trump (yeah, he's mentioned more than will make you comfortable) can become president of the United States – such concepts as justice lose any real meaning.
Did that sound like it's a political book? Well it's not, because even that would make too much sense. The Feral Detective is, well, what it is: a beautifully written book that seems to accomplish exactly what it set out to do, which just happens to be to give fans of detective fiction everything they want while leaving them completely uncomfortable about why they want it.
I'm really glad I read The Feral Detective. Now I'm going to go bang my head against a wall and wait for the pain to stop.
That's how I came away from reading The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem, a fabulously-written pseudo detective story that I doubt fans of detective stories will ever want to read.
Let me start by giving the simple, hooky description of the book: The Feral Detective is a noir mystery in which the protagonist is the client rather than the private investigator.
Easy, right?
Phoebe Siegler is a woman on a mission: to find the missing daughter of her best friend Rosalyn. Or maybe she's just trying to escape her suffocating and mundane New York life. Unless of course she's really just having a slow-moving nervous breakdown over the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. Presidency. All three are true, all three are fascinating in different ways. The combination feels oddly resonant – as if Lethem is showing us the otherwise inexplicable and largely indefensible inner algorithms behind our own actions. We think we're acting for noble reasons, but underneath, we're just launching ourselves into whatever bizarre experiences will simultaneously drug us out of our pain and give us the amusing anecdotes we need to construct a plausible explanation for how we got there.
Notice how I started with a pretty saleable premise: a detective story in which the client is the protagonist, and then pretty quickly got somewhere weird enough that you're not sure what's going on with this book?
What's going on is a lot of brilliant writing. Lethem gives the first-person narration a noir feel without cribbing his descriptive passages from the 1930's and 40's masters, instead giving Phoebe her own noir voice that's contemporary, credible, and vivid. The book's also compulsively readable: short chapters, fun characters, and a plot that isn't afraid to take you out into the desert to visit weird ex-hippy tribes who may or not be raiding each other, committing murders, and looking for a new king to rule them.
Where the book challenges the reader is in the way it not only subverts mystery and thriller tropes but actively revels in using them to deny you the satisfaction those tropes usually bring. You never, not for a second, get that sense of justice being restored. What's even stranger is that it's not as if Lethem's written one of those ponderously ambiguous "I'm going to deny you any real answers and leave the reader unsettled" books that only those writers who deem the genre beneath them (yet want the money it generates) choose to produce once in a while. Lethem really does give you the answers, the big action sequences, the love scenes, the punch-ups. He just does it in a way that leaves you wondering if any of it meant anything at all, or if – in an age where Donald Trump (yeah, he's mentioned more than will make you comfortable) can become president of the United States – such concepts as justice lose any real meaning.
Did that sound like it's a political book? Well it's not, because even that would make too much sense. The Feral Detective is, well, what it is: a beautifully written book that seems to accomplish exactly what it set out to do, which just happens to be to give fans of detective fiction everything they want while leaving them completely uncomfortable about why they want it.
I'm really glad I read The Feral Detective. Now I'm going to go bang my head against a wall and wait for the pain to stop.
May 10, 2019
Jonathan Lethems THE FERAL DETECTIVE (DER WILDE DETEKTIV; Original erschienen 2018) erinnert ein wenig an jene frühen Filme, die mit der CG-TechnikI – Computer Generated Imagery – arbeiteten. Hatte man es nicht gerade mit einem Werk von Steven Spielberg zu tun, fiel oftmals auf, daß die Wesen, die da künstlich in das Material kopiert wurden, kein spezifisches Gewicht hatten. Sie wirkten nicht mit ihrer Umgebung verbunden, sie wirkten losgelöst von Boden, Gravitation und jenen, mit denen sie interagierten. Dennoch schaute man einigen dieser Werke gern zu, denn obwohl diese CGI-Wesen völlig aus dem Film herausfielen, war es manchmal ganz interessant, oft auch ungewollt komisch, zu beobachten, was sich die IT-Künstler da so hatten einfallen lassen. So ähnlich verhält es sich also mit Lethems Roman. Der wirkt ebenso losgelöst von gesellschaftlicher Realität, historischer Bedingung und gegenwärtigen Entwicklungen, obwohl er genau diese drei Themen behandelt.
Uneinheitlich und auf seltsame, schwer erfassbare Weise zerfasert wirkt diese wilde Geschichte um eine junge Frau, die sich – schamgebeugt, weil sie sich als Teil der Medienmeute für mitverantwortlich für den Sieg Donald Trumps bei der Präsidentschaftswahl 2016 fühlt – auf die Suche nach der verschwundenen Tochter einer guten Freundin begibt, dabei auf den titelgebenden wilden Detektiv trifft, der sie in eine seltsame Welt einführt. Eine Welt, die sich abseits der Zivilisation in der kalifornischen Mojavewüste etabliert hat; eine Welt, die aus den Gesellschaften der „Kaninchen“ und der „Bären“ besteht – die einen wie die andern Mutationen einstmaliger Hippiekommunen, die zusehends verwildert und regressiert sind. Die junge Frau namens Phoebe, die uns die Geschichte erzählt, verliebt sich schnell und wild in den Detektiv und folgt ihm in die gefährliche Wüste. Dort wird sie nicht nur fündig, was ihr Ziel – die junge Arabella – betrifft, sondern sie entdeckt in sich auch atavistische Anwandlungen, die sie zu einem Mitglied eben jener „Kaninchen“, eine weitestgehend matriarchale Gesellschaft, und schließlich sogar zur Mörderin werden lassen. Phoebe trifft auf höchst seltsame Gestalten, Barbaren der Postmoderne, kaltblütige Mörder und jede Menge Junkies, und muß einige Abenteuer bestehen, bevor sie ihren Charlie Heist – so der Name des wilden Detektivs – in die Arme schließen kann, auch wenn diese Beziehung bis zur letzten Seite prekär bleibt.
Lethems Ich-Erzählerin bedient sich einer meist schnoddrigen Sprache, lässt keinen – meist ironischen, gelegentlich sarkastischen, seltener zynischen – Spruch aus und stößt dabei zunächst alles und jeden vor den Kopf. Sie muß aber auch lernen, daß sie in einer Umgebung, in der Kondensstreifen am Himmel, Feuer in der Nacht und bestialisch ermordete Jugendliche, die zeichenhaft auf Berghöhen angeordnet werden, weitaus mehr Aussagekraft und Symbolwert haben, als das gesprochene oder gar geschriebene Wort. Umgeben von Zivilisationsverächtern, Apokalyptikern und Propheten der letzten Tage, die die Atombombe als Metapher begreifen, prallt die gelernte New Yorkerin immer wieder an die Grenzen ihrer Profession und deren Werkzeug – der Sprache. Natürlich ist es nicht ohne Ironie, wenn ein Schriftsteller der Sprache ein so einschränkendes Urteil ausstellt, zugleich aber die Zeichenhaftigkeit der Natur, der Elemente und aller möglichen menschgeschaffenen Erscheinungen fast filmisch herausstellt. So bleibt der Leser auch lange im Unklaren, ob er es hier mit einem grundironischen Werk zu tun hat, oder ob das, was ihm da geboten wird, alles ernst nehmen soll.
Daß Phoebes Schnoddrigkeit zunächst oft verunglückt und auch wenig witzig wirkt, mag sicherlich auch der Übersetzung zuzuschreiben sein, man wird diesen New Yorker Slang, diesen Sound der Hipster und Upper Class People kaum adäquat ins Deutsche übertragen können. Doch ist sie in Anbetracht dessen, was die Heldin hier teils erleben muß, auch nicht kohärent. Die Geschichte entwickelt sich zusehends in ein wirkliches Abenteuer, sie wird härter, auch brutaler, und entbehrt nicht gewisser tragischer Momente. Und so fragt sich der Leser zusehends, was Lethem eigentlich erzählen will, denn ein Krimi, wie der Titel vermuten ließe, ist dies nicht. Ein literarisches Vexierspiel, wie der deutsche Titel mit Anleihen an Roberto Bolaños Roman DIE WILDEN DETEKTIVE evoziert, ist dies aber auch nicht. Wohl kann man gewisse Verwandtschaften erahnen, bspw. zu Autoren wie Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan und anderen, doch bleibt das eben eher Ahnung denn Gewißheit. Die Verspieltheit und auch Abgehobenheit der Story, das Changieren zwischen beißender Ironie und brutaler Realitätsanalyse verweist letztlich immer nur auf sich selbst.
Es scheint Lethem vor allem darum zu gehen, eine Gesellschaft abzubilden, die einen Menschen wie Trump hervorgebracht und mit ungeheurer Macht ausgestattet hat; eine Gesellschaft, deren verschiedene Parteien sich gespalten, kompromißlos und auf verschiedenen Seiten eines nahezu unüberwindlichen Grabens gegenüber stehen, dabei immer verschrobener werden und schließlich zum Äußersten bereit sind, um ihre Ansichten und Meinungen als die alleingültigen durchzusetzen. Aber auch eine Gesellschaft – Phoebes häufige Verweise auf Songs, Filme und Fernsehserien jüngeren Datums legen dies nahe – die sich aus den Niederungen einer Popkultur speist, in der Fakten und Fiktionen nahtlos ineinander übergehen und die ihre ganz eigenen, prägenden Metaphern und damit auch Wirklichkeiten schafft. Phoebe kehrt irgendwann in ihre Welt – das gehobene New Yorker Milieu der Kreativen, der Medienschaffenden und Künstler – zurück und findet hier vor allem Ignoranz, Abgestumpftheit und Desinteresse vor. Einzig die Demonstration, die sich wenige Tage nach Trumps Wahlsieg in den Straßen der Metropole des 20. Jahrhunderts bildet, macht ihr Mut. Doch für Phoebe, die in ihrer Liebe auch sich selbst gefunden zu haben scheint, kommen diese Zeichen eines Erwachens zu spät. Sie bricht wieder auf, um ihren Geliebten in der Wildnis zu finden und aus den Fängen der „Bären“ zu befreien.
Lethem schreibt als Mann aus der Sicht einer Frau, was an sich schon meist keine gute Idee ist. Aber er bastelt sich hier ein psychologisch wenig glaubwürdiges Wesen zusammen, das es gar nicht erwarten kann, den Körper ihres Geliebten mit ihren sprachlich nun ja eher nutzlosen Lippen abzutasten und zu bearbeiten, die sich zwar ihre Angst eingesteht, zugleich aber bereit ist, sich auf jedes noch so verrückte Abenteuer einzulassen und sich schließlich einer nie näher definierten Übermacht, einer feindlichen Armee der Nacht zu stellen und sie mit Hilfe eines verwahrlosten Kindes zu besiegen. Psychologisch ebenso unglaubwürdig sind hier alle anderen Figuren, was aber im Kontext dann keine Rolle mehr spielt. Man muß eben akzeptieren, es hier weitestgehend mit Menschen, Figuren, Pappkameraden zu tun zu haben, die sich ja ganz bewusst aus den mit menschlichen Werkzeugen analysierbaren Strukturen verabschiedet haben. Dysfunktionalität als Norm. So neu ist das nicht.
Trotz all dieser Kritik muß man Lethem zugestehen, daß sein Roman einen seltsamen Sog entwickelt und man doch wissen will, wie es weiter geht und zu welchem Ende das Ganze kommt. Er findet zwischen einigen verunglückten manchmal doch auch beeindruckende Bilder und Metaphern, und es ist ihm bei allem Sarkasmus, der den Text grundiert, doch anzumerken, daß es ihm bitter ernst ist. Und vielleicht hat er ja recht, daß gewollte Unernsthaftigkeit, Sarkasmus und Ironie die letzten Mittel sind, dieser Welt und ihren Bewohnern zu begegnen, will man nicht vollends verrückt werden.
Uneinheitlich und auf seltsame, schwer erfassbare Weise zerfasert wirkt diese wilde Geschichte um eine junge Frau, die sich – schamgebeugt, weil sie sich als Teil der Medienmeute für mitverantwortlich für den Sieg Donald Trumps bei der Präsidentschaftswahl 2016 fühlt – auf die Suche nach der verschwundenen Tochter einer guten Freundin begibt, dabei auf den titelgebenden wilden Detektiv trifft, der sie in eine seltsame Welt einführt. Eine Welt, die sich abseits der Zivilisation in der kalifornischen Mojavewüste etabliert hat; eine Welt, die aus den Gesellschaften der „Kaninchen“ und der „Bären“ besteht – die einen wie die andern Mutationen einstmaliger Hippiekommunen, die zusehends verwildert und regressiert sind. Die junge Frau namens Phoebe, die uns die Geschichte erzählt, verliebt sich schnell und wild in den Detektiv und folgt ihm in die gefährliche Wüste. Dort wird sie nicht nur fündig, was ihr Ziel – die junge Arabella – betrifft, sondern sie entdeckt in sich auch atavistische Anwandlungen, die sie zu einem Mitglied eben jener „Kaninchen“, eine weitestgehend matriarchale Gesellschaft, und schließlich sogar zur Mörderin werden lassen. Phoebe trifft auf höchst seltsame Gestalten, Barbaren der Postmoderne, kaltblütige Mörder und jede Menge Junkies, und muß einige Abenteuer bestehen, bevor sie ihren Charlie Heist – so der Name des wilden Detektivs – in die Arme schließen kann, auch wenn diese Beziehung bis zur letzten Seite prekär bleibt.
Lethems Ich-Erzählerin bedient sich einer meist schnoddrigen Sprache, lässt keinen – meist ironischen, gelegentlich sarkastischen, seltener zynischen – Spruch aus und stößt dabei zunächst alles und jeden vor den Kopf. Sie muß aber auch lernen, daß sie in einer Umgebung, in der Kondensstreifen am Himmel, Feuer in der Nacht und bestialisch ermordete Jugendliche, die zeichenhaft auf Berghöhen angeordnet werden, weitaus mehr Aussagekraft und Symbolwert haben, als das gesprochene oder gar geschriebene Wort. Umgeben von Zivilisationsverächtern, Apokalyptikern und Propheten der letzten Tage, die die Atombombe als Metapher begreifen, prallt die gelernte New Yorkerin immer wieder an die Grenzen ihrer Profession und deren Werkzeug – der Sprache. Natürlich ist es nicht ohne Ironie, wenn ein Schriftsteller der Sprache ein so einschränkendes Urteil ausstellt, zugleich aber die Zeichenhaftigkeit der Natur, der Elemente und aller möglichen menschgeschaffenen Erscheinungen fast filmisch herausstellt. So bleibt der Leser auch lange im Unklaren, ob er es hier mit einem grundironischen Werk zu tun hat, oder ob das, was ihm da geboten wird, alles ernst nehmen soll.
Daß Phoebes Schnoddrigkeit zunächst oft verunglückt und auch wenig witzig wirkt, mag sicherlich auch der Übersetzung zuzuschreiben sein, man wird diesen New Yorker Slang, diesen Sound der Hipster und Upper Class People kaum adäquat ins Deutsche übertragen können. Doch ist sie in Anbetracht dessen, was die Heldin hier teils erleben muß, auch nicht kohärent. Die Geschichte entwickelt sich zusehends in ein wirkliches Abenteuer, sie wird härter, auch brutaler, und entbehrt nicht gewisser tragischer Momente. Und so fragt sich der Leser zusehends, was Lethem eigentlich erzählen will, denn ein Krimi, wie der Titel vermuten ließe, ist dies nicht. Ein literarisches Vexierspiel, wie der deutsche Titel mit Anleihen an Roberto Bolaños Roman DIE WILDEN DETEKTIVE evoziert, ist dies aber auch nicht. Wohl kann man gewisse Verwandtschaften erahnen, bspw. zu Autoren wie Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan und anderen, doch bleibt das eben eher Ahnung denn Gewißheit. Die Verspieltheit und auch Abgehobenheit der Story, das Changieren zwischen beißender Ironie und brutaler Realitätsanalyse verweist letztlich immer nur auf sich selbst.
Es scheint Lethem vor allem darum zu gehen, eine Gesellschaft abzubilden, die einen Menschen wie Trump hervorgebracht und mit ungeheurer Macht ausgestattet hat; eine Gesellschaft, deren verschiedene Parteien sich gespalten, kompromißlos und auf verschiedenen Seiten eines nahezu unüberwindlichen Grabens gegenüber stehen, dabei immer verschrobener werden und schließlich zum Äußersten bereit sind, um ihre Ansichten und Meinungen als die alleingültigen durchzusetzen. Aber auch eine Gesellschaft – Phoebes häufige Verweise auf Songs, Filme und Fernsehserien jüngeren Datums legen dies nahe – die sich aus den Niederungen einer Popkultur speist, in der Fakten und Fiktionen nahtlos ineinander übergehen und die ihre ganz eigenen, prägenden Metaphern und damit auch Wirklichkeiten schafft. Phoebe kehrt irgendwann in ihre Welt – das gehobene New Yorker Milieu der Kreativen, der Medienschaffenden und Künstler – zurück und findet hier vor allem Ignoranz, Abgestumpftheit und Desinteresse vor. Einzig die Demonstration, die sich wenige Tage nach Trumps Wahlsieg in den Straßen der Metropole des 20. Jahrhunderts bildet, macht ihr Mut. Doch für Phoebe, die in ihrer Liebe auch sich selbst gefunden zu haben scheint, kommen diese Zeichen eines Erwachens zu spät. Sie bricht wieder auf, um ihren Geliebten in der Wildnis zu finden und aus den Fängen der „Bären“ zu befreien.
Lethem schreibt als Mann aus der Sicht einer Frau, was an sich schon meist keine gute Idee ist. Aber er bastelt sich hier ein psychologisch wenig glaubwürdiges Wesen zusammen, das es gar nicht erwarten kann, den Körper ihres Geliebten mit ihren sprachlich nun ja eher nutzlosen Lippen abzutasten und zu bearbeiten, die sich zwar ihre Angst eingesteht, zugleich aber bereit ist, sich auf jedes noch so verrückte Abenteuer einzulassen und sich schließlich einer nie näher definierten Übermacht, einer feindlichen Armee der Nacht zu stellen und sie mit Hilfe eines verwahrlosten Kindes zu besiegen. Psychologisch ebenso unglaubwürdig sind hier alle anderen Figuren, was aber im Kontext dann keine Rolle mehr spielt. Man muß eben akzeptieren, es hier weitestgehend mit Menschen, Figuren, Pappkameraden zu tun zu haben, die sich ja ganz bewusst aus den mit menschlichen Werkzeugen analysierbaren Strukturen verabschiedet haben. Dysfunktionalität als Norm. So neu ist das nicht.
Trotz all dieser Kritik muß man Lethem zugestehen, daß sein Roman einen seltsamen Sog entwickelt und man doch wissen will, wie es weiter geht und zu welchem Ende das Ganze kommt. Er findet zwischen einigen verunglückten manchmal doch auch beeindruckende Bilder und Metaphern, und es ist ihm bei allem Sarkasmus, der den Text grundiert, doch anzumerken, daß es ihm bitter ernst ist. Und vielleicht hat er ja recht, daß gewollte Unernsthaftigkeit, Sarkasmus und Ironie die letzten Mittel sind, dieser Welt und ihren Bewohnern zu begegnen, will man nicht vollends verrückt werden.
December 10, 2018
Maybe a little higher than 2 but not a 3 for me. Interesting plot at times but I'm not a fan of men writing novels that are narrated by women. Women do it so much better, IMHO. Also, didn't bond with any of the characters, except for maybe the dogs.
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