The Feral Detective by Jonathan LethemMy 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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Second review:
ReplyDeleteI’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.