--- title: In 'The Feral Detective,' Trump Era Is a Detective Story description: In 'The Feral Detective,' Jonathan Lethem wanted to address 'the shape that male identity takes when it loses dominance.' canonical: https://time.com/5441441/trump-era-detective-novel-jonathan-lethem/ author: Karl Vick article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2018-11-01T11:04:41.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-05-11T04:57:26.804Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: A Beloved Author Turns the Trump Era Into a Rowdy Detective Story og:description: 'The mystery: How bad can things get?' og:url: https://time.com/5441441/trump-era-detective-novel-jonathan-lethem/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt324b89c66954174a/69893df7096a945c8f6a3d11/feral-detective-jonathan-lethem-book-social.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1803 og:image:height: 1202 og:image:alt: Feral Detective Jonathan Lethem Book SOCIAL og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: A Beloved Author Turns the Trump Era Into a Rowdy Detective Story twitter:description: 'The mystery: How bad can things get?' twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt324b89c66954174a/69893df7096a945c8f6a3d11/feral-detective-jonathan-lethem-book-social.jpg?branch=production ---  # A Beloved Author Turns the Trump Era Into a Rowdy Detective Story > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account.  by [Karl Vick](https://time.com/author/karl-vick/)  ## Karl Vick Editor at Large Nov 1, 2018 11:04 AM UTC  Jonathan Lethem Jonathan LethemBenedict Evans—August  by [Karl Vick](https://time.com/author/karl-vick/)  ## Karl Vick Editor at Large Nov 1, 2018 11:04 AM UTC Jonathan Lethem is a big fan of Raymond Chandler’s, so it’s not by chance that his new novel, _The Feral Detective_, begins where Chandler’s _The Big Sleep_ leaves off, about 40 miles east of Los Angeles, on the section of old Route 66 called Foothill Boulevard. It no longer looks like it did when Philip Marlowe flirted with death outside a shady garage in the rain. But Lethem found himself called back to what he calls “the cradle of my prose” when he wrote the introduction to a wonderful recent volume, _The Annotated Big Sleep_. “How I learned to write sentences was in that sardonic, disappointed, romantic, first-person, hard-boiled voice,” he says. It’s the same voice that narrates Lethem’s 11th novel, a return to the genre that animated his first books and the 1999 breakout _Motherless Brooklyn_, though he’s not known for being predictable. His 2005 MacArthur Fellowship cited “narratives that explore the relationship between high art and popular culture.” He recently reworked Allen Ginsburg’s Howl in the language of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. _The Feral Detective_ begins, as detective stories so often do, with an attractive woman bringing a missing-persons case into the shabby office of a private eye. The (quite winning) conceit of the novel is that the client, not the detective, is its protagonist: Phoebe Siegler is the jaded one here, wisecracking while trying to remain true to her personal code in a mixed-up world. The detective, Charles Heist, is a cipher with an ailing possum in his desk drawer and a child seeking refuge in his closet. Heist proves handy as a romantic interest, as well as for his deep knowledge of the Mojave Desert subcultures into which the missing girl has disappeared–a utopian community that devolved into warring tribes, women against men.  Lethem returns to detective fiction two decades after his hit Motherless Brooklyn That’s the plot. The mystery: How bad can things get? It’s the question Lethem found himself entertaining after the 2016 election, which kicks off the book. He had assumed a detective novel about gender roles would be “a really good book to write during the Hillary Clinton Administration.” Upon reflection, he recognized the enveloping darkness–his view of the Trump era–as noir. “What happens to the impulse to preserve a masculine reality?” Lethem asks. He wanted to interrogate, in the book as in the world, the shape that male identity takes when it loses dominance. What he found was not encouraging. “It didn’t turn out to be a Robert Bly drumming circle. It turned into Pepe the Frog and all this horrible, horrible online sh-t.” Lethem has observed that the rhythms of detective fiction are set as firmly as those of the sonnet. His first book, _Gun, With Occasional Music_, riffed on Chandler too, and _Motherless Brooklyn_ featured a detective with Tourette’s syndrome in the New York City borough where Lethem was himself raised in a commune, albeit the brownstone kind, with a political-activist mother and an avant-garde painter dad. That milieu informed 2013’s _Dissident Gardens_, a reflection on American leftism. “Actually, if you look at Heist,” Lethem says of his new detective character, “he is me. He’s the oldest you can be and still be hippie-raised.” A Californian now, Lethem teaches at Pomona College, itself “a stone’s throw” from Foothill Boulevard. He savors the settings that have inspired not only him but also fellow hard-boiled crime-fiction writers like Ross Macdonald, who conjures, he says, “really accurate descriptions of the strangeness of the civilization that’s been kind of laid like a veneer over this desert.” Lethem calls the Mojave “fabulous” and “desolate,” but says you don’t come out of it with any illusions. The client in _The Feral Detective_ certainly doesn’t. “What Phoebe uncovers for herself–to the extent that there’s political implication in it–is that the more things change, the harder they are to change back,” he says. He sees that in the sobering landscape of 2018 as he looks ahead to the midterm elections, which fall on the same day _The Feral Detective_ will be released. Like Phoebe, we’ll have to work through the mess we’re in. Or, as Lethem puts it: “We’re not going to just vote our way out of it.” ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/5441441/trump-era-detective-novel-jonathan-lethem/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/5441441/trump-era-detective-novel-jonathan-lethem/"},"headline":"A Beloved Author Turns the Trump Era Into a Rowdy Detective Story","datePublished":"2018-11-01T11:04:41.000Z","dateModified":"2026-05-11T04:57:26.804Z","description":"In 'The Feral Detective,' Jonathan Lethem wanted to address 'the shape that male identity takes when it loses dominance.'","url":"https://time.com/5441441/trump-era-detective-novel-jonathan-lethem/","keywords":["Books"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt324b89c66954174a/69893df7096a945c8f6a3d11/feral-detective-jonathan-lethem-book-social.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Karl Vick","jobTitle":"Editor at Large","url":"https://time.com/author/karl-vick/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt324b89c66954174a/69893df7096a945c8f6a3d11/feral-detective-jonathan-lethem-book-social.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Feral Detective Jonathan Lethem Book SOCIAL","caption":"Jonathan Lethem","creditText":"Benedict Evans—August","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/books/","name":"Books"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/5441441/trump-era-detective-novel-jonathan-lethem/","name":"A Beloved Author Turns the Trump Era Into a Rowdy Detective Story"}}]}] ```