THE FERAL DETECTIVE

Reviewed by Steven H Silver

Jonathan Lethem’s Feral Detective tells the story of Phoebe’s search for Arabella, the daughter of a good friend of hers, who has run away. The novel opens with Phoebe’s arrival in Los Angeles as she approaches Charles Heist, theoretically the titular detective, to enlist his assistance in her quest. Phoebe’s comments from the very beginning indicate that her relationship with Charles will grow into something much more than a client relationships.

The novel takes place in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election and Phoebe, a New Yorker who worked for the New York Times, has quit her job because of the feeling she couldn’t make a difference there and her bosses wouldn’t take Donald Trump’s election seriously enough. Quitting has given her the time to track down Arabella, but it quickly becomes apparent to the reader that the election results have left Phoebe as adrift and lost as the runaway she is trying to return. It also leaves the reader questioning the source of Phoebe’s money to conduct the search necessary and stay in California without any income.

Phoebe and Heist seem to be an unlikely pair and their relationship appears to be more caused by their proximity and Phoebe’s insistence that Charles take her along with him in his investigations. While the search for Arabella is the driving mystery of the novel, the real mystery is Charles Heist, himself, whose activities and background raise more questions about him than about Arabella’s disappearance, although it also becomes clear that his mysteries leave him in a particularly useful position for the primary search.

While the search takes place around Los Angeles, it is in the Inland Empire and Lethem makes it clear that politically and culturally this is a very different southern California than is usually depicted. Much of the action takes place in rural lands adjacent to urban areas, easy to get to with the ubiquitous cars, but not somewhere most people actually go and removed from the highways and strip malls. Squatters and cultists thrive apart from mainstream society and a 1970s commune can still exist, even if it has run amok and splintered in the forty years since its founding.

Phoebe finds herself in a world not only physically far from the Manhattan she is used to, but one in which those who take any interest in politics are as likely to be Trump supporters as they are staunch libertarians, who have no use for her particularly brand of liberalism. The situation doesn’t help Phoebe’s attempts to come to terms with the outcome of the recent election, but she isn’t alone in that many people still, two years after the results came in, are having trouble understanding what happened in November of 2016. Lethem provides an unreliable narrator and the reader questions most of her perceptions, not only of Heist and the situations in which she finds herself, but in her understanding of things Heist tells her about the world into which he has dragged her. While Phoebe describes the growth of their relationship, Heist doesn’t seem to imagine that he is in a relationship with her, although he certainly benefits from her own interpretation of their situation, especially once Arabella has been located and returned to her mother.

There is a spiritual aspect to the novel, although it isn’t particularly easy to define. The spirituality infuses not only the two blocs that have grown out of the commune, but also Arabella, who has sought to find a place for herself in the Inland Empire, and Heist, who has a history with the commune that he had thought he had distanced himself from, even if he hadn’t completely escaped it. Phoebe’s lack of susceptibility may be one of the factors that allows her to become a savior to those who need it, even as she remains lost.

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