Review: The Feral Detective

The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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.


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