I didn’t really enjoy this book. The language was interesting and having the current political situation play a part added a dimension,but didn’t make up for the characters. The female narrator did not ring true to me, though perhaps her identity as a Manhattan socialite was just too foreign for me.
The fact that it is pretty much love at first sight between hard boiled detective and client seemed more than a bit unbelievable. Perhaps she is touched by his rescue of animals and people, but why does he fall for her?
The desert people are interesting and, the deserted festival atmospheric, but didn’t make up for the irritation I felt at the main character.
Maybe that was intentional ( )

While trying to find her friend's missing teen daughter in the Los Angeles area, New Yorker Phoebe Siegler enlists the reluctant assistance of Charles Heist, a loner of few words who seems immune to Phoebe's sarcasm and nearly non-stop talking. I was expecting the story to be told from Heist's point of view; instead, it's told from Phoebe's narration as she continually reconsiders her opinion of Heist and even herself.

The search for the missing Arabella takes Phoebe and Heist up a mountain, then into the desert where Phoebe encounters people living off the grid who challenge her way of thinking. The story is set in the early days of the Trump administration, which provides a backdrop for Phoebe's unraveling. Finding Arabella is the plot point that sets the story in motion, but it's Phoebe's snarky voice that gives the book its soul. ( )

Affected and implausible. ( )

I'm probably not the only reader out there who felt a little let down by Jonathan Lethem's recent output, but maybe we really do demand too much of our heroes: having written "Motherless Brooklyn" and "The Fortress of Solitude," I'm not sure if he has anything to prove to anyone. Even so, I thought that "Chronic City" was a major downer, a dull, plotless mess, so I kind of let him be for a while. "The Feral Detective" is the first Lethem I've picked up in a while and I'm glad to report that it is something like a return to form.

It also seems like a return to his natural inclinations. Lethem's books have always transmitted his love for genre writing -- specifically crime novels -- and with private eye and all-around mystery man Robert Heist, it feels that Lethem's back on solid ground. There are other echoes here, too: he still seems fascinated with the destructive fallout from the utopian living experiments of the late sixties and with gentrification and class divides, issues that have taken on new urgency in contemporary, Trumpified America.

As for the book itself, we follow a former lower-level media employee -- a New York girl if there ever was one -- scour the rural of highlands in search of a missing teenager. The natives are not friendly, and we make the acquaintance of some appropriately symbolic post-sixties animal-themed tribes, a plot development that will probably strike some readers as too on-the-nose. I'm not sure that Lethem means to be so neatly didactic though and the book is fast-moving and crisply written. A lot of California lit seems entranced by the state's awesome landscape, but the main character of "The Feral Detective" has a brain that won't shut up, and how much you'll like the book may depend on how high a tolerance for that sort of thing you have. This novel is both the search for a lost girl and for meaningful community in a fractured, exhausted America, but I feel that Lethem does just enough to avoid easy answers to make our tagging along on this trip worthwhile. It's true: we'll probably be seeing dozens of books that deal with how to form real bonds in the midst of our current national disarray, but not every writer out there has Lethem's steady hand, or his talent for writing appealingly addictive, flexible prose. I was glad to have found the author in good form here. Maybe I should check out some of the novels he wrote while the country was busy falling apart and I was busy reading other stuff. ( )

This is not my favorite Lethem by miles. It was fine but just didn't click as much for me as some of his others have. There's certainly more going on than I spent real time trying to figure out -- sort of a fable, some political stuff, some stuff about dualism or reconciling contradictions, some stuff about tribalism and othering, and how all these things relate to one another -- and that's all very interesting, but neither these things nor the book's story grabbed me hard enough that I felt compelled to engage really deeply with what Lethem was doing. ( )