In The Feral Detective Joanthan Lethem uses some of the conventions of the hard-boiled detective novel in an attempt to come to terms with the anguish and shock suffered by Progressives when all their comfortable assumptions about America were trashed by the election of Donald Trump.
The novel's protagonist is not the detective but the detective's client. Phoebe quits her job at the New York Times in protest after the Times post-election sitdown with Trump. At loose ends and feeling completely upended, Phoebe takes on a new challenge: Arabella, the rebellious daughter of her best friend, Sylvia, has dropped out of college and disappeared. Phoebe, who sees herself as Arabella's confidant and role model, decides to find Arabella and persuade her to return home.
Phoebe suspects Arabella has gone to California, so she heads off to L.A. where she winds up hiring a private investigator, Charles Heist --- the so-called Feral Detective --- as her local guide. Heist has an interesting past: he grew up in a hippie commune in the desert, abandoned by his parents, and ran away back to the city. He's made it his job to rescue children from similar situations. Even if they later decide to go back to the desert, he's at least given them the right to choose for themselves.
Heist leads Phoebe on a rambling journey into the High Desert country southeast of Los Angeles, following possible clues to Mount Baldy and then to Joshua Tree. The journey has allegorical overtones. Phoebe encounters people living off the grid and over the edge, constructing their own primitive tribal existence, an uneasy alliance of Bears (men) and Rabbits (women), that includes ritual hand-to-hand combat between Heist and Sweet Love, the leader of the Bears, with Arabella the prize for the winner.
It's an interesting book, by turns comic, profane, tender and violent. Sex is explicit in Phoebe's relationship with Heist (no surprise there).
This really isn't detective fiction; it's politics dressed up as a fable, one man's attempt to make sense of a senseless world. It's intended audience will greet it with relief; everyone else, I suspect, will find it incomprehensible.
Click HERE to read the review from Publishers Weekly.
Click HERE to read the review from CrimeReads.com
Click HERE to read the review from Time.com
Click HERE to read the interview with the author from National Public Radio.
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