Audiobooks
The Feral Detective

by Jonathan Lethem
Harper Audio, November 2018, $34.99

The novel’s narrator, Phoebe Siegler, who quit her job at The New York Times when its editors agreed to meet-nice with newly elected Donald Trump (“the Beast Elect”), agrees to track down a Reed College student, the daughter of an NPR producer-friend, who’s gone missing. Arabella, a Leonard Cohen fan affected by his passing (the day before the presidential election), was, when last seen, on her way to the Zen monastery in the San Gabriel Mountains where the singer-songwriter once spent five years. Flying her Veronica Mars flag, Phoebe crosses the country and in LA seeks and receives the assist of so-called “feral” PI Charles Heist, a middle-aged, fox-faced gent whose fondness for God’s critters exceeds St. Francis’ and includes housing an opossum, as opposed to a bottle of booze, in his desk drawer. He also bays at the moon. This truly odd pair wander the mountains and off the grid into the Mojave in search of Arabella, encountering an array of odd inhabitants including two warring tribes. The Rabbits are mostly female with a kooky leader named Anita. The predominantly male Bears are led by a young self-proclaimed king, Solitary Love, whom Heist winds up fighting in an amphitheater. The yarn, filled with wacky characters, oddball situations, and anti-Trump attitude, is often at a loss for logic, but it and its pop cult references are pretty entertaining. Reader Mamet (late of the HBO series Girls and born into theater royalty—her father is David Mamet, her mother actress Lindsay Crouse, and her grandfather was playwright Russell Crouse) has a unique voice—casual and croaky—that’s perfectly tuned to Phoebe’s snarky descriptions of her life and times and isn’t bad when it comes to Heist and the other curiosities she encounters. As amusing as The Feral Detective is, it would be a mistake to compare it to Motherless Brooklyn. Though both are uniquely creative, the former is a woozy, wandering adventure, the latter a sharply crafted crime novel. It would be like comparing, well, Bears and Rabbits.

Dick Lochte
Teri Duerr
6356
Lethem
November 2018
the-feral-detective
34.99
Harper Audio