Being a big fan of Lethem, I always enjoy his latest offering. The Feral Detective is not, you might say, typical Lethem, but what does that even mean? If anything, he's proven that he can write around diverse landscapes of genres with great skill. Like Woody Allen movies, I always associate my favorite Lethem novels with a NYC setting (Motherless Brooklyn, Fortress of Solitude, Chronic City), and this story, set on the edge of the Mojave desert in California, is about as far from that world as you can get (but then again, so is the alien planet of Girl with Landscape). There is a NYC connection here, and it comes unexpectedly in person of the narrator, 30-something, neurotic and female Phoebe. The plot revolves, at least in the first half, around a road trip complete with a noir-ish beat-up P.I. named Charles Heist and the ostensible quest to find the missing daughter of a friend. That plot gets played out but a new one takes its place in the second half, as Phoebe goes back to "rescue" Charles from the "Bears", one of the post-hippie tribes (the other being the "Rabbits") as he is mixed up in a deep association with the area and its feral inhabitants. I'm not sure Lethem completely pulls off his female narrator believably, but the book is enjoyable and does work as a kind of hybrid detective novel-noir piece-psychodrama.
A review of the book from the New York Times can be found at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/books/review/feral-detective-jonathan-lethem.html
A review of the book from the New York Times can be found at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/books/review/feral-detective-jonathan-lethem.html
