{"id":3415,"date":"2019-02-25T16:28:23","date_gmt":"2019-02-25T22:28:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/?p=3415"},"modified":"2019-02-25T16:28:23","modified_gmt":"2019-02-25T22:28:23","slug":"the-feral-detective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/2019\/02\/25\/the-feral-detective\/","title":{"rendered":"The Feral Detective"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Jonathan Lethem<\/h2>\n

Harper Collins, 2018<\/h4>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The Feral Detective<\/em> is a fictional response to the last presidential election.<\/p>\n

Its first-person narrator, Phoebe Siegler, has quit her job at The New York Times<\/em> because she\u2019s angry with her editors for not being harder on the newly elected President Trump, whom she refers to as \u201cthe Beast-Elect\u201d and the \u201cMonster in the Tower.\u201d She\u2019s angry about a lot of other stuff too, mostly in a \u201chere\u2019s how mad I am and how foul-mouthed I can be about it\u201d way rather than a \u201chere\u2019s what I\u2019m going to do about it\u201d way. She\u2019s not very likeable.<\/p>\n

But maybe Lethem doesn\u2019t intend her to be, at least at first. In any event, with time on her hands now that she\u2019s quit her job, she travels from New York to California to search for her friend Roslyn\u2019s daughter, Arabella, who has gone missing from college. She may have gone to California. A social worker there suggests that Phoebe enlist the help of Charles Heist, who has some expertise in finding missing persons. He\u2019s the Feral Detective.<\/p>\n

What makes him feral? Like so many detectives in the noir tradition he is a solo practitioner, disdains the social graces, speaks in gnomic utterances, and operates with what is clearly his own moral code, the tenets of which are hard to discern from the outside. He is feral, we learn as the novel progresses, because he was brought up in a remote California desert area by a band of men, though he defects at one point in his childhood to a band of women nearby. He\u2019s the child who was raised by wolves, though in this case the wolves are a bunch of hippies, ex-cons, motorcycle riders, and other questers.<\/p>\n

Like so many quest novels, Phoebe\u2019s journey is really one of self-discovery, though they do find and rescue Arabella. She\u2019s not as unlikeable by the end of the novel, but she\u2019s still angry.<\/p>\n

This novel has been greeted with both praise and disappointment. The Washington Post<\/em> argues that \u201cThe Feral Detective<\/em> is one of [Lethem\u2019s] nimblest novels, a plucky voyage into the traumatized soul of the Trump era,\u201d asking the question \u201cWho can really be saved in our collapsing society?\u201d Of Phoebe, the narrator, the Post<\/em> says, \u201cShe\u2019s sharp and sassy and always willing to confess her own contradictory feelings, which sway erratically from lust to terror.\u201d<\/p>\n

The New Yorker<\/em>, on the other hand, takes a different view, calling The Feral Detective<\/em> \u201ca ridiculous book.\u201d Of Charles Heist, the eponymous detective, it says that he \u201cnever lives on the page\u2014he\u2019s a thousand-mile stare, a leather jacket.\u201d Of Phoebe, the narrator, The New Yorker <\/em>says, \u201cLethem\u2019s strategy for writing an \u201cauthentic\u201d woman appears to consist mostly of emphasizing her sexuality.\u201d In sum, \u201cThe book suggests that men writ large are dangerous and atavistic (\u201cstuck in the past\u201d), whereas women writ large are flibbertigibbet clowns for whom nothing is sacred\u2014more of a step sideways from Trumpism than a step forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

I wouldn\u2019t call this a ridiculous book, but I responded to it more along the lines of The New Yorker<\/em> rather than the Post.<\/em> Perhaps it would have been better for Lethem to process his reaction to the election longer before turning it into fiction.<\/p>\n

Back to the Bookshelf<\/a><\/em><\/h2>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Jonathan Lethem Harper Collins, 2018 The Feral Detective is a fictional response to the last presidential election. Its first-person narrator, Phoebe Siegler, has quit her job at The New […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1133,"featured_media":3417,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pdas-bookshelf"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/files\/2019\/02\/91NIicdmvLb.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1133"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3415"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3415\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3418,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3415\/revisions\/3418"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}