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The Feral Detective: A Novel
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Published:
HarperCollins 2018
Status:
Available from OverDrive
Description

Jonathan Lethem's first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn

"One of America's greatest storytellers." —Washington Post

Phoebe Siegler first meets Charles Heist in a shabby trailer on the eastern edge of Los Angeles. She's looking for her friend's missing daughter, Arabella, and hires Heist to help. A laconic loner who keeps his pet opossum in a desk drawer, Heist intrigues the sarcastic and garrulous Phoebe. Reluctantly, he agrees to help. The unlikely pair navigate the enclaves of desert-dwelling vagabonds and find that Arabella is in serious trouble—caught in the middle of a violent standoff that only Heist, mysteriously, can end. Phoebe's trip to the desert was always going to be strange, but it was never supposed to be dangerous. . . .

Jonathan Lethem's first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn, The Feral Detective is a singular achievement by one of our greatest writers.

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Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Street Date:
11/06/2018
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780062859082
ASIN:
B07869VTBL
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Jonathan Lethem. (2018). The Feral Detective: A Novel. HarperCollins.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Jonathan Lethem. 2018. The Feral Detective: A Novel. HarperCollins.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Jonathan Lethem, The Feral Detective: A Novel. HarperCollins, 2018.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Jonathan Lethem. The Feral Detective: A Novel. HarperCollins, 2018.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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Date Added:
Nov 02, 2018 17:08:54
Date Updated:
Nov 07, 2022 21:24:55
Last Metadata Check:
Mar 25, 2024 17:42:35
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        Jonathan Lethem is the bestselling author of twelve novels, including The Arrest, The Feral Detective, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. He currently teaches creative writing at Pomona College in California.

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fullDescription

Jonathan Lethem's first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn

"One of America's greatest storytellers." —Washington Post

Phoebe Siegler first meets Charles Heist in a shabby trailer on the eastern edge of Los Angeles. She's looking for her friend's missing daughter, Arabella, and hires Heist to help. A laconic loner who keeps his pet opossum in a desk drawer, Heist intrigues the sarcastic and garrulous Phoebe. Reluctantly, he agrees to help. The unlikely pair navigate the enclaves of desert-dwelling vagabonds and find that Arabella is in serious trouble—caught in the middle of a violent standoff that only Heist, mysteriously, can end. Phoebe's trip to the desert was always going to be strange, but it was never supposed to be dangerous. . . .

Jonathan Lethem's first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn, The Feral Detective is a singular achievement by one of our greatest writers.

reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: Washington Post
      • content:

        "A highbrow mystery. . . . Fans of Motherless Brooklyn take note." — Washington Post

        "Being a Jonathan Lethem novel, natural, The Feral Detective has plenty to say about American society along the way." — Newsday

        "Lethem [is] a master of the genre-bending detective novel and eccentric characters." — Huffington Post

        "The Feral Detective investigates our haunted America in all its contemporary guises — at the edge of the city, beyond the blank desert, in the apartment next door. It's a nimble and uncanny performance, brimming with Lethem's trademark verve and wit." — Colson Whitehead

        "Like The Crying of Lot 49 as written and directed by Elaine May, The Feral Detective is hilarious and terrifying and wrenching. Phoebe is one of the grandest, funniest heroes I've come upon in a long time." — Megan Abbott

        "Wild, urgent, and very funny. As always, Lethem writes knowingly and brilliantly about weird, off-the-grid, wayward America. In his ever-more-electric prose, he illuminates both the barbarity and the beauty." — Dana Spiotta

        "I want to read a shelf of Heist. I want to make him my new Travis McGee, and that's, seriously, the highest praise I know." — Joshua Cohen

        "A funny but rage-fueled stunner. . . . Both [characters] are compelling, as are the desert setting and the vividly realized descriptions of its dwellers. . . . An unrelentingly paced tale. . . . Utterly unique and absolutely worthwhile." — Booklist (starred review)

        "Surrealistic, genre-bending. . . . The personal nature of Phoebe's tectonic shift in the desert is palpable, made flesh by Lethem's linguistic alchemy. . . . A haunting tour of the gulf between the privileged and the dispossessed." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        Lethem (A Gambler's Anatomy, 2016, etc.) returns with his first surrealistic, genre-bending detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn (1999).Having long abandoned Brooklyn for the West Coast, Lethem has written a hallucinatory novel set in the desert fringes of the Inland Empire in California. Readers, many of whom should be absorbed by this story, will soon realize the author has more to say about the current state of America and his deeply fractured heroine than lies on the surface. Our narrator is Phoebe Siegler, once a bourgeois Manhattanite with a sarcastic streak, now unmoored by the last presidential election. Trying to break her malaise, she travels to Los Angeles at the behest of a friend whose teenage daughter has disappeared during a Leonard Cohen-inspired pilgrimage to Mount Baldy. She's referred to private detective Charles Heist, a "fiftyish cowboyish fellow" dubbed "The Feral Detective" for his predilection for saving strays, be they kids or animals. What might have devolved into a Coen Brothers-esque farce instead offers a dark reflection on human nature as Heist introduces Phoebe to something like a cult living on the fringes of society--what might happen if hippies and outcasts left civilization, never to return, devolving into a tribal, ritualistic culture tinged with conspiracy theory. It's a place where the seemingly laconic Heist has deep roots and a culture where his mere presence yields disturbing violence. There's not really a mystery to solve, and the sexual tension between Phoebe and Heist feels obligatory, but Lethem fills his canvas with tinder-dry tension. The subtext is the division in American society, but the personal nature of Phoebe's tectonic shift in the desert is palpable, made flesh by Lethem's linguistic alchemy. "Old fears had flown the coop without my noticing and been replaced: I was positively aching to abscond into the Mojave again, the fewer road signs the better," she says. "No cities for me now, or families or tribes."A haunting tour of the gulf between the privileged and the dispossessed.

        COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (Online Review)

      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        September 10, 2018
        Lethem hits a wall in his forgettable latest (following A Gambler’s Anatomy). Phoebe Siegler, a consummate New Yorker, travels to the Mojave Desert in search of Arabella, a friend’s missing daughter and an 18-year-old dropout of Reed College. She hires hirsute Charles Heist, the “feral detective,” who lives with three dogs and an opossum. Quickly falling for his woodsy charms, Phoebe travels with Heist to the far reaches of the desert, where the mostly female Rabbit group is engaged in a long standoff with the male Bear group. To save Arabella, Heist will have to do battle with the charismatic Bear leader, called Solitary Love, as Phoebe learns to question her assumptions here on “the far side of the Neoliberal Dream.” The novel feels like it was written as a kind of therapy in the aftermath of the 2016 election—which Lethem’s characters frequently bring up—as well as the death of Leonard Cohen, who also gets a lot of ink. None of this can salvage the book, which features howling men and howling bad prose (during a sex scene, Phoebe longs for Heist to “uncrimp my foil”), making this tone-deaf Raymond Chandler pastiche an experiment worth avoiding.

      • premium: True
      • source: Booklist
      • content:

        Starred review from August 1, 2018
        Nearly two decades after his last mystery, Motherless Brooklyn? (1999), Lethem gives us another, a funny but rage-fueled stunner about a New Yorker tracking her mentor's missing daughter on the West Coast. When 18-year-old Arabella disappears from Reed College, talkative Phoebe reaches out to taciturn Charles Heist, who is either a feral detective, a detective who finds feral youths, or both?it's not immediately clear. Together, they track Arabella (who is using Phoebe's name) up Mount Baldy to a Buddhist retreat and then out into the Mojave Desert where Arabella may be among the Rabbits or the Bears, two long-established communities of off-the-gridders with very different cultures. Set in the days surrounding Donald Trump's inauguration, this echoes with Phoebe's explicitly voiced outrage and sadness about the country's political right turn, yet it also feels allegorical, what with lost tribes wandering in the desert and all. Lethem, apparently, began writing feverishly the day after Trump was elected, and it's fascinating to read a book set at such a specific and recent moment. Both Phoebe and Charles are compelling, as are the desert setting and the vividly realized descriptions of its dwellers, who, seeing their own country grow alien, have left the center for the margins. Politics aside, it's an unrelentingly paced tale where the protagonists' developing relationship is just as interesting as the puzzle they're trying to solve. Utterly unique and absolutely worthwhile.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        June 15, 2018

        Billed as MacArthur Fellow Lethem's first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn but obviously much more, this work opens with Phoebe Siegler in the desert near Los Angeles seeking out offbeat Charles Heist for his remarkable people-finding skills. Phoebe is looking for her friend's missing daughter, caught somewhere between two opposing factions--the Rabbits and the Bears--living off the grid in inland California. With a 200,000-copy first printing.

        Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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Jonathan Lethem's first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn

"One of America's greatest storytellers." —Washington Post

Phoebe Siegler first meets Charles Heist in a shabby trailer on the eastern edge of Los Angeles. She's looking for her friend's missing daughter, Arabella, and hires Heist to help. A laconic loner who keeps his pet opossum in a desk drawer, Heist intrigues the sarcastic and garrulous Phoebe. Reluctantly, he agrees to help. The unlikely pair navigate the enclaves of desert-dwelling vagabonds and find that Arabella is in serious trouble—caught in the middle of a violent standoff that only Heist, mysteriously, can end. Phoebe's trip to the desert was always going to be strange, but it was never supposed to be dangerous. . . .

Jonathan Lethem's first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn, The Feral Detective is a singular achievement by one of our greatest writers.

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