Review of The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem

It's history that the counter-culture hippies of the 60s and 70s eventually evolved into the yuppies of the 80s. But not all evolved. A few took their fringe communes and evolved them into cults even further from civilization. As much of the hippie movement centered on San Francisco, it's not a surprise that some of these communes/cults ended up in the wilds of California. In 2018's The Feral Detective, Jonathan Lethem puts a New York divorcee in the Mojave, then adds a missing teen, a handful of dogs, and a terse private eye, giving readers a recipe for a funny take on the politics of 2016.

Jonathan Lethem has written a wide spectrum of novels, from science fiction fevre dreams to modern Manhattan noir, subtle satire to rural Maine dystopias. The Feral Detective may very well be Lethem's lightest fare. Its mold is classic. A quirky woman hires an esoteric private eye to track down a runaway teen in the bizarre outskirts of Los Angeles. From there, things resolve in unexpected but not unexpected fashion. There are clues, people to be interviewed, a twist or two,ingredients you know will likely be present.

But the first crack in the mold—first clue things are not entirely as they seem—is that Lethem's prose is a bit too self-aware to make for a proper bestseller. Secondly, and most importantly, is that real-world politics pop in now and then, Hilary this, Trump that. But it's arriving at the book's centerpiece, a desert rivalry between two untamed tribes of urban whites, that the book's theme sets aside the mystery and takes over, setting aside notions this is a standard P.I. tale. Where the reader may sometimes find living in the real world to be a dichotomy of political extremes, Lethem makes the metaphor real. He also rightfully sets it in the middle of the desert, away from the (common sense) majority. And it's precisely here the novel finds its place.

All this being said, The Feral Detective will not go down as Lethem's magnum opus. It's a one-off, a sardonic thought experiment. What else can a person do looking at the political scene of 2016 into 2017 but laugh? Lethem seems to be asking. His cult metaphors, the Rabbits on the extreme left and Bears on the extreme right, are not intended to be subtle. They are not literary genius, rather intentional absurdism, absurdism reflecting our absurdism of reality.

Something must be said of Phoebe, the main character. While occupying the role of 'normal person encountering the absurd', she retains a quirkiness that sets her apart. Lethem clearly understands that as leading lady she cannot be too staid, too normal. As such, the novel's denouement—Phoebe's denouement, in fact—is extended far beyond that of a standard missing person's mystery to complete the (fitting) quirkiness of her arc. Thus, how the novel got the title it has is beyond me. Rabbits, Bears, and Possums might have been a better title?

In the end, The Feral Detective is a classic mystery set in the weirdness of modern, rural California with subtle absurdist, political humor. A light read overall, Lethem keeps pace steady, carves out a solid main character in Phoebe, and says what a lot of us are saying about the ludicrous state of political affairs in the US. Worth a read, but only one.