9780062866592
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The Feral Detective audiobook

  • By: Jonathan Lethem
  • Narrator: Zosia Mamet
  • Category: Crime, Fiction
  • Length: 8 hours 53 minutes
  • Publisher: HarperAudio
  • Publish date: November 06, 2018
  • Language: English
  • (2720 ratings)
(2720 ratings)
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The Feral Detective Audiobook Summary

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.

Bonus: Stay tuned after the end of the audiobook to hear an exclusive conversation between Zosia Mamet and Jonathan Lethem.

Other Top Audiobooks

The Feral Detective Audiobook Narrator

Zosia Mamet is the narrator of The Feral Detective audiobook that was written by Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem is the bestselling author of twelve novels, including The Arrest, The Feral DetectiveThe Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. He currently teaches creative writing at Pomona College in California.

About the Author(s) of The Feral Detective

Jonathan Lethem is the author of The Feral Detective

The Feral Detective Full Details

Narrator Zosia Mamet
Length 8 hours 53 minutes
Author Jonathan Lethem
Category
Publisher HarperAudio
Release date November 06, 2018
ISBN 9780062866592

Subjects

The publisher of the The Feral Detective is HarperAudio. includes the following subjects: The BISAC Subject Code is Crime, Fiction

Additional info

The publisher of the The Feral Detective is HarperAudio. The imprint is HarperAudio. It is supplied by HarperAudio. The ISBN-13 is 9780062866592.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

Goodreads Reviews

Violet

July 16, 2021

This is greatly entertaining to read but the kind of novel that pushes up misgivings the more you think about it afterwards. A dystopia in the midst of contemporary American life. Phoebe, our narrator, is a kind of semi-professional political reporter. (She's not convincing in this role but it's easy to ignore her biographical detail in the narrative.) She's no longer a teenager but appears to still be repeating the experiences of a teenager, to have yet to overcome them. Her best friend asks her to find her daughter Arabella who has gone missing. (Two very posh British names for American girls). The only clue to Arabella's whereabouts is her obsession with Leonard Cohen and the Buddhist retreat at the edge of the desert outside Los Angeles into which he vanished for six years. The trail soon leads Phoebe to "the feral detective". Charles Heist is known in the area for rescuing waifs and strays from the various cults in the desert. Together they venture into the desert. There are two cults here - the Rabbits and the Bears. The Rabbits are essentially female and peace loving; the Bears are macho and violent. What we have is a kind of cartoon version of the political rift in American society. Two misgivings: the political allegory aspect of the novel can be too heavy handedly signposted and even veer towards the crass at times. The novel begins at the time of the Trump election victory and runs through to his inauguration. And Phoebe is way more irritating than she needs to be. Lethem ought to have softened some of her sharp grating edges. She's almost the antithesis of the loveable Lionel in Motherless Brooklyn. She thinks she's more cool than she is, more liberal too - vanities most of us share and which he could have made more of.

Ron

November 06, 2018

“The Feral Detective” is a brilliant noir title — right down to its misdirection. Charles Heist, the mysterious man at the center of Jonathan Lethem’s new novel, is a detective of sorts, but he isn’t feral. He’s Clint Eastwood-cool, all self-contained and aloof, capable of silencing a room with a glance. His native wildness hasn’t been domesticated so much as chained. He also keeps a live opossum in his office, but I’m getting ahead of myself.The good news is that Lethem is back in the PI game, and there is no bad news. “The Feral Detective” is one of his nimblest novels, a plucky voyage into the traumatized soul of the Trump era. Lethem is sleuthing around as he did almost 20 years ago in “Motherless Brooklyn,” but this time he’s 3,000 miles away from New York in the mountains of Southern California. The city that never sleeps has been replaced by the desert that never speaks, and his celebrated parody of hard-boiled detective fiction is now distilled to a clear amber spirit.“The Feral Detective” is narrated by 30-something Phoebe Siegler, who quit the New York Times in a fit of rage over the election of Donald Trump. Regardless of the wisdom of that career move, Phoebe is now free to help an old friend who’s trying to locate her missing college-age daughter, Arabella. Knowing the young woman is a Leonard Cohen fanatic, Phoebe suspects that Arabella has gone to the Mount Baldy Zen Center outside Los Angeles, where Cohen. . . . To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...

Hans

July 28, 2018

There was a stretch of time that opening a Jonathan Lethem book was akin to discovering a new room inside my own brain. Perhaps this was in part due to shared geography (Oakland/Berkeley/Bay Area, Brooklyn), though just as much of his approach of bridging genres or layering the fantastical on top of our realities. (My mind is racing through so many of his worlds including the one where the poorest people live in their cars caught in an infinite traffic jam or that love triangle with the man, the woman and the void.) In his most recent books, I have caught sparks of brilliance, but by the whole work did not meld/morph with my mind. And now we stand with The Feral Detective, which travels through new shared geographies in the high desert of California, a place I have visited at least annually for 14 years. The timeframe of the story is also one that sticks in my mind, the traumatic days of Our Dear Leader ascending into power to wreak American carnage on everyone. My mind has caught up and tortured by the minute-by-minute refresh of horrors brought on with a [redacted] man and his kakistocracy. In this time and place, my mind has been searching for a word or phrase to name and contain this MAGA-hate-shit. I did not find that word/phrase/container in Michael Wolff's sensational exploration of the Trump-storm. I skipped Comey's book...as I'm getting tired of putting myself in the position of picking at scabs that are just starting the healing process. Improbably, Lethem's book did a part of this work to name/contain our dark present world. I'm not sure why it had this effect, but it did. ("Great. Excellent. Let's examine everything from the Bear perspective. It trumps anything I could possibly say. I hate how that word is ruined, among so many other ruined things.")You cannot even get the book yet, so I don't want to give too much away. (Thanks to my local book store for giving me their Advance Reader copy. You should all buy this book at an *independent* bookstore when it is available in November 2018.) I will say that it is a mystery...and coming from Jonathan Lethem, it is also not exactly a mystery. Perhaps it is a fable. Or a zen mystery...a zen-Leonard-Cohen.There are weaknesses here--chief among them, that Lethem's narrator often feels like the-idea-of-a-woman-as-written-by-a-man rather than a woman. As a man, perhaps, I am not the right person to accurately judge this. (Though this is a nice semi-related sentence from the book: "Well, on the one hand there's mansplaining, and on the other, there's the sound of a woman quoting the mansplaining to another woman.")Beyond the political sphere, the book also captures my sense of loss for the world of the high desert. ("What I like about the desert people is that it's the only place you can have an honest conversation about the apocalypse. That's as true of the guy at the gas station on Twentynine Palms as any of us way out here.") The high desert area (Joshua Tree, Yucca Valley, Pioneertown) has radically changed in the years since I first visited. It is gentrification, but it's beyond gentrification...and a key book-ending epiphany directly speaks to this. (view spoiler)[ GO BUY THE BOOK AND FIND IT FOR YOURSELF. (hide spoiler)] Again, Lethem gave voice to help name a question that has been forming in my head. There isn't an answer, but I'm starting to see the word...and that word is--again, very improbably--this book."So we fell into silence again, our headlights illuminating a tunnel through yellow dusk, our treads crossing and recrossing palimpsests of the vehicles that had gone this way, whether an hour or a month before I couldn't tell."In our present mad world, I'm thankful to have a chance to examine a few more rooms in my own mind. I'm glad that once again, Jonathan Lethem is my guide.

Lemar

November 21, 2018

Highest recommendation for this fever dream of a novel. Any purchase or perspective on the sense of unreality felt after the election of 2016, from the shock that millions of American adults were willing to trade the ideals of democracy for putting themselves First requires the deep dive this novel offers. “Television had elected itself, I figured. It could watch itself too, for all I cared. I read my book.” “I didn’t want to have to rescue myself” is a sentiment among many I share with protagonist Phoebe Siegler. This classic New Yorker, hip, funny and irreverent finds herself in LA and quickly realizes, “to go east from the sea was to go deeper into the west”. That cowboy, violence-soaked lone wolf territory so central to our national self myth, yet opposed to to our global ideal of the City on a Hill is right there waiting, just outside the city where the lanes shrink from six wide to a ribbon if highway to a dirt road and beyond. “Ordinary people might be the most terrifying thing on earth. Or ordinary Americans, I should say.” On tv she sees who I picture as Lindsay Graham, “a baby faced senator smirked and stonewalled around the implications of his lifetime’s jolly bigotry.” Phoebe is diving in. Afraid? Often yes, but unwilling to look away, to not be involved. “My fears were themselves rooted in a stark appetite for something unnameable but real.” “To be feral wasn’t merely to be a wild child, but to be one cut loose, or run loose, from some point of origin.”Jonathan Lethem’s new novel along with fellow New Yorker Gary Shteyngart’s Lake Success are the best novels I’ve read from our new era. “It trumps anything I can possibly say. I hate how that word is ruined, among so many other ruined things.”

Don

November 21, 2018

(3 1/2). I can't quite put my finger on what really tickled my fancy about this book. Could it be that Phoebe is such a cool, sort of protagonist? Is it that Charles Heist is almost an anti-protagonist, the ultimate mystery man? Is it the setting in a part of the California desert that I am very familiar with? It is the 60's cult thing going on that hits my imagination? is it the anti-Trump fervor that drives Phoebe? Probably some of all of this, but Lethem's style is so easy to read and this book flows along so nicely I felt it really worked. A different deal. Really good fun.

Sebastien

September 26, 2019

Have you ever watched someone perform an amazing feat only to then wonder why on earth they'd choose to do it? I'm talking about the kid on YouTube who successfully juggles fifteen cereal boxes in the air, somehow managing to get a few bits from each one in his mouth, spits them up into a bowl and then shows you a perfectly-arranged mixture of fifteen different cereal brands? Or the guy who shows up on a local TV morning show and can recite the entire works of Tolstoy backwards in German while on a unicycle? It's that sense of, "Wow, this person has done something amazing! Phenomenal! Super . . . wait, why did they do that? With all that talent, why did they use it just to be weird?"That's how I came away from reading The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem, a fabulously-written pseudo detective story that I doubt fans of detective stories will ever want to read.Let me start by giving the simple, hooky description of the book: The Feral Detective is a noir mystery in which the protagonist is the client rather than the private investigator.Easy, right?Phoebe Siegler is a woman on a mission: to find the missing daughter of her best friend Rosalyn. Or maybe she's just trying to escape her suffocating and mundane New York life. Unless of course she's really just having a slow-moving nervous breakdown over the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. Presidency. All three are true, all three are fascinating in different ways. The combination feels oddly resonant – as if Lethem is showing us the otherwise inexplicable and largely indefensible inner algorithms behind our own actions. We think we're acting for noble reasons, but underneath, we're just launching ourselves into whatever bizarre experiences will simultaneously drug us out of our pain and give us the amusing anecdotes we need to construct a plausible explanation for how we got there.Notice how I started with a pretty saleable premise: a detective story in which the client is the protagonist, and then pretty quickly got somewhere weird enough that you're not sure what's going on with this book?What's going on is a lot of brilliant writing. Lethem gives the first-person narration a noir feel without cribbing his descriptive passages from the 1930's and 40's masters, instead giving Phoebe her own noir voice that's contemporary, credible, and vivid. The book's also compulsively readable: short chapters, fun characters, and a plot that isn't afraid to take you out into the desert to visit weird ex-hippy tribes who may or not be raiding each other, committing murders, and looking for a new king to rule them.Where the book challenges the reader is in the way it not only subverts mystery and thriller tropes but actively revels in using them to deny you the satisfaction those tropes usually bring. You never, not for a second, get that sense of justice being restored. What's even stranger is that it's not as if Lethem's written one of those ponderously ambiguous "I'm going to deny you any real answers and leave the reader unsettled" books that only those writers who deem the genre beneath them (yet want the money it generates) choose to produce once in a while. Lethem really does give you the answers, the big action sequences, the love scenes, the punch-ups. He just does it in a way that leaves you wondering if any of it meant anything at all, or if – in an age where Donald Trump (yeah, he's mentioned more than will make you comfortable) can become president of the United States – such concepts as justice lose any real meaning.Did that sound like it's a political book? Well it's not, because even that would make too much sense. The Feral Detective is, well, what it is: a beautifully written book that seems to accomplish exactly what it set out to do, which just happens to be to give fans of detective fiction everything they want while leaving them completely uncomfortable about why they want it.I'm really glad I read The Feral Detective. Now I'm going to go bang my head against a wall and wait for the pain to stop.

Ben

January 02, 2019

Clever writing with a scattershot, referential plot and I would have given it five stars but it ended without a good climax. It fizzled but maybe Lethem wanted to end it that way. Still, he's a really fine writer and I will probably read his next one.

John

February 04, 2019

When mainstream novelists tackle the genres they can run the risk of reinventing the wheel, and -- although Lethem has past form with detective/noir fiction, in the form of Motherless Brooklyn, which I've owned for years but, shame on me, haven't yet read -- to a certain extent this is the case here. However, Lethem goes out of his way to bend the genre rules, making his tale as quirkily offbeat as possible so that what starts with a familiar trope -- PI and sidekick go in search of missing teen -- becomes something rather different.The action takes place in the time between Trump's election and his sparsely attended inauguration. In shock over what's happened, Phoebe Siegler throws over her low-level job at the New York Times. While she's still wondering what to do in the wake of this pointless gesture, she's asked by an old friend to go out to California and search for the friend's daughter, Arabella, who's dropped out of college and gone to find herself, or possibly to find the shade of the late Leonard Cohen.Phoebe is guided to the office of PI Charles Heist, the Feral Detective. Together they venture up Mount Baldy, where apparently Cohen's guru dwelt and where they discover a double murder, and then out into the desert, seeking Arabella among two rival feral populations of outcast humanity, the largely female Rabbits and their counterparts, the Bears, who're mostly not just male but macho male. These two communities are, I think, meant to represent symbolically the two polarized populations of post-election America, although Lethem doesn't underscore the point too crudely.Phoebe and Heist find and rescue Arabella, but that's far from the end of the story, because now Phoebe must find and rescue Heist . . .The tale is told in the first person by Phoebe, who's sort of appealingly rebarbative, an intelligent, self-aware airhead -- you could imagine her as the third of the Banger Sisters. This makes her an entertaining companion, even if sometimes an unsettling one: while it's easy to share her post-election trauma, she's such a flake herself that it's hard to know how seriously we should take that trauma. Her political worldview seems to be shaped entirely by her horror over the ghastliness that has befallen America; there seems little room in her conception for what she wanted instead of this, or for what she might have done to prevent the disaster. The two friends of hers we meet, Roslyn (Arabella's mother) and Stephanie, are champagne liberals, prepared to cluck about that frightful man in the White House but complacent in their own insulation from the potential fallout, and in some ways Phoebe falls into the same category: clearly she's never had to worry too much where her next buck's coming from. At the same time, to do her credit, despite her flakiness Phoebe is prepared to free herself from her roots and face undoubted cerebral and physical dangers for the sake of restoring some sort of order to her own small corner of the fascist, post-reality world, where mobs howl their belief in simple solutions to complex problems.The book's easy to read, partly because of Lethem's prose (although it took me a few pages to get accustomed to this) and partly because the narrative's divided into no fewer than 78 Pattersonianly short chapters. There are quite a few striking flashes of wit in among the anti-bigotry fury -- Phoebe may be a bit of an airhead but she's not stupid -- and a couple of egregiously graphic sexual depictions. (Not that I'm against egregiously graphic sexual depictions. It's just that they seemed out of place here, in fart-at-a-funeral fashion.) Although, of course, the narrative was written by a male author in the voice of a female, I didn't feel Lethem got too much wrong in that respect; on the other hand, I'm a male too, so how should I know?All in all, if you come to The Feral Detective anticipating a standard PI novel, you're likely in for a surprise. Whether that surprise is nasty or nice is really up to you. For myself, I was happy enough to go wherever Lethem (and Phoebe, because this is a Phoebe Siegler novel, not a Charlie Heist novel) led me.

Robert

December 31, 2018

Another hard boiled pulp novel from Jonathan Lethem, though this one was less effective for me than Motherless Brooklyn. Phoebe, a woman in her early thirties who lives in New York, is asked by a friend to help find Arabella, her college-aged daughter, who is probably somewhere in Southern California near Mt. Baldy. Phoebe enlists the help of Charles Heist, who has a reputation for finding lost souls. She becomes rather involved in him and they end up in a cult-like group of ex-bikers and other survivalists out in the middle of the desert. In her pursuit for Arabella, she learns much about this ragtag bunch and why they are doing what they do.This novel takes place just after the Orange Man (as Lethem calls him), takes over as President of the US. Obviously, he is much distressed by this and uses this novel as a means to show how we got here. The desert faction kind of acts as a metaphor for our times, and our heroine is desperately trying to find a way to effectively deal with it. To give the author credit, he performs this rather subtly, never shoving it in your face. It does become a bit convoluted at times, but the narrative does proceed rather smoothly most of the time.There is some humor spread throughout (our heroine is quite sarcastic and brash), and there are some really gripping parts. Overall a very good polemic for out troubled times.

Adam

November 24, 2018

The Feral Detective is a book that defies description, in many ways. A detective novel? Yes. A romance? Pretty much. A satire for how to live in Trump's America? Sure. An in-depth look at Californian subcultures of mountain and desert people? Why not.Despite being all those things, this novel just really worked for me on almost every level. I devoured it in about three sittings, completely consumed by the characters, the setting, and the narrative. Lethem's writing style injects pitch black humor at many of the exact opportune moments, maintaining a level of levity throughout that keeps the reader engaged and also make sure we are never taking anything too seriously, despite the life-or-death circumstances.I know the likelihood is low given Lethem's literary cred, but I would love this to become an ongoing series and continue to read stories about Phoebe and Charles Heist.

Suzanne

October 10, 2018

The Feral Detective reminds me of those 1970s films that took place in California, involved strange esoteric groups of people living off the grid with copious drug use, often hallucinatory, that obscured the plot and everyone seemed to be under 30 yrs old. There was always a down and out detective searching for someone, usually a young woman. So, that kind of movie is this book. It is interesting as its own kind of time capsule but it’s often not enough to keep my mind from wandering. It needs a sound track. I received my copy from the publisher through edelweiss.

Jason

December 25, 2018

3.5 Stars The Feral Detective was a decent read. It had some great moments of mystery and action. It suffered from pacing and character development. I am a big fan of Jonathan Lethem and will definitely read more from him.

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