King of the Bears

Jonathan Lethem’s new book is billed as ‘his first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn’, which won America’s national book critics circle award for fiction in 1999. But if you’ve ever read his work, you’ll know not to expect a straightforward crime-solving tale — or anything like it. Throughout his career, Lethem has set out to wrong-foot his readers with a tricksy blend of realism, literary pastiche, ruminations on America and narrative elements that are deeply, even recklessly, odd. Now, in The Feral Detective, he’s at it again.

The book begins traditionally enough, with the thirtysomething narrator Phoebe Siegler hiring a suitably grizzled Californian private eye called Charles Heist to track down a missing friend in January 2017 (a date that’ll prove significant). For a while, in fact, the only sign that we’re in Lethem territory is that Heist keeps an opossum in his desk. (Naturally, we never find out why.) It even seems as if there might be an orthodox plot of sorts, featuring a mysterious bunch of Koreans who’ve built a compound on Mount Baldy and may have formed an alliance with a group of survivalists in the neighbouring Mojave desert. Yet once Phoebe and Heist head into the desert to investigate, the Korean connection — along with most of the rest of the plot — is abandoned in favour of something, well, deeply, even recklessly, odd.

The survivalists in question, known as the Bears, were once part of a hippie commune, but split from the other members, known as the Rabbits, in the early 1970s and the two groups have been feuding ever since. Given that the Bears are all men and the Rabbits mainly women and children, there seems little doubt who the goodies are. The trouble is that the Bears now want Heist, who spent his early years in the commune before the split, to be their king.