“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,

On the Wild EdgeA 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 op...

Mostly, this book makes me sad.Should you read it?Only after you read all that other stuff. (view spoiler)[I remember my last year in college, my last semester actually, when I was having a rather challenging time and wrote a short story about myself from my roommate's point of view. And that pretty much nails The Feral Detective, Lethem's attempt to deal with Trump's election by writing about himself a laconic man from a disillusioned city woman's point of view.Sadly, it's a mess. The main ch...

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 des...

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 he...

This book had some very good dogs.

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 t...

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...

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.

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 protago...

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.

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 o...

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 c...

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.

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...

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 inco...

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.

(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 bo...

I did not read this again, but changed my review. Not the rating. 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!

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.