Jonathan Lethem on Detectives, Frontiers, and Utopias

Interviewing Jonathan Lethem is a pleasure. On the phone and on the page, he is consistently inventive, philosophical, funny, and introspective, whether he’s speaking as himself, a low-level mobster with Tourette’s, or a former New York Times employee in her thirties who, a month after Trump’s election, flees the paper of record for the California desert.

It’s not quite that simple. Phoebe, the spiky, big-hearted protagonist of Lethem’s latest novel, The Feral Detective, goes to the Inland Empire to look for her friend Roslyn’s disappeared daughter Arabella, a Leonard Cohen-loving Reed dropout who, Phoebe suspects, is on a pilgrimage to Mount Baldy. To track her down, Phoebe turns to the feral detective: Charles Heist, a gentle loner who keeps a rescued opossum in his desk drawer.

Heist, it turns out, is even more feral than he seems. He leads Phoebe to the place where he grew up: Joshua Tree, deep in the desert, home of the Rabbits and the Bears. Not animals: hippies, social dropouts, who have divided themselves into all-female and all-male communities and, more or less, gone to war. The Feral Detective is a classic Lethem crime novel, which is to say that it resembles nothing else on Earth.

I talked to Lethem about Chandler, California, and what it means to write hard-boiled fiction. He was, from start to finish, a delight.

Lily Meyer: The Feral Detective is your first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn. How did you get back to that space?

Jonathan Lethem: I was asked to write the introduction to an annotated The Big Sleep. That got me re-reading Chandler, who has always been an influential—a formatively influential—voice for me. At the same time, I was thinking about where I live, in Southern California. I’ve been here a few years, and though I’ve been a Californian before, there’s something about the way I’m dwelling here now that’s sinking in differently. The place is more real to me than it was for a long time. That made me turn to Ross Macdonald, especially to his late eco-crime novels. He writes about this landscape so scrupulously and directly.

LM: Phoebe is such an excellent narrator, and such a strong female voice. I think this is a very feminist book. How did you, as a male writer, approach that?

JL: I take that as extraordinary praise. I’ve always worked hard on my female characters, and it’s funny that the books I’m most associated with are, literally, motherless. Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude are dad-and-boys books, where women are symbolic presences that are being yearned for. But the book that preceded those two, Girl in Landscape, which is in some ways my favorite, comes from the perspective of a thirteen-year-old girl. Not in first person, though. With Phoebe, I thought, not only is she going to be the protagonist, not only are we going to think and feel what what she thinks and feels, but I’m going to do it in first person.

How do you create a character, though? You consult the only emotions, psyche, and selfhood you actually have access to—your own—and combine it with characters you’ve read in other peoples’ books and projections of people in your own life. Then, if you’re lucky enough, you scrape all these things into one giant space, breathe on it like you’re breathing on an ember to start a fire, and then, sometimes, the person becomes real to you. Phoebe did. I was very lucky. She announced herself. She was funny, and dark, and I was happy to spend time with her. That’s what writing the book was like. It was like talking to Phoebe about what pissed her off, what she wanted, what she was confused about. I loved listening to her.

LM: I did, too. And I love that Phoebe, not the male detective, is the wise-ass. It’s such an inversion of the detective framework. How else do you invert or subvert the genre?

JL: The detective genre was a great instigator for this book, but I’m a very cavalier crime writer. For me, the action is in voice, milieu, and set pieces. I’m a great adherent of Chandler’s, and Chandler himself was a very half-assed storyteller in some ways. He famously lost track of who killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep. He had that maxim, which has always been a very important and licensing one for me: When you don’t know what should happen in your story, have a person walk through the door with a gun in their hand.

Beyond that, The Feral Detective uses the genre as a proscenium arch. It’s a gateway into the story, which turns into a romance and a book-as-chase-scene. It’s about velocity and movement across landscape, with brief interruptions for philosophical fugues, sex, and violence. It’s a detective story nominally, but it’s less about investigation than about the state of being detective stories put you into.

LM: One thing The Feral Detective has in common with Chandler and Macdonald, I think, is it’s a critical investigation of masculinity. Did that happen post-Trump?

JL: Not at all. When I began thinking about an investigation into these ridiculous, off-the-grid communal tribes in the desert, I recognized instantly that I was creating a gender allegory. What Trump has de-sublimated in our culture was all there. Now it’s on the outside, every moment, but it was all there. I was nagging at this material in my own brain for a while, daring myself to write about men and women in this querying way. I wanted to know what men will look like if we get somewhere new. Will they be like the Bears? Will they be Robert Bly-type guys in brocaded vests, drumming and sulking? That was one route to Charles Heist, the feral detective.

I was also thinking of the frontier figure that obsesses American culture. Like John Wayne: a guy on the edge, a guy who makes the frontier safe, but who is himself unsafe for civilization. He’s a traumatized figure who can’t be recuperated for the town he creates, almost like a Tarzan or a Mowgli. In this allegory I’m creating, all men are feral. All men are unsafe. The question is how to bring them into a world where we want to live.

LM: What’s Heist’s relationship to Lionel Essrog in Motherless Brooklyn?

JL: Lionel is such an important character to me, and yet I can’t believe he came from me. People love him so much, and are so often disappointed that I haven’t written more Lionel, or that I’m not as sweet and lovable as Lionel—but nobody is! None of my other characters approach that degree of lovability, though if I were to make a comparison, I would compare Phoebe to Lionel Essrog. She’s a first-person voice, trying to figure herself out on the page for you. And even though she’s so spiky, I hope that she maybe, possibly, is my second-most lovable character.

As far as Heist, his condition of the feral child is a lot like Lionel’s condition of the orphan. It’s something I keep working over. Even though I wasn’t orphaned, and I wasn’t raised by animals, something about my childhood in New York in the seventies was a kind of urban ferality, or I think about it that way. It’s a little like how everyone identifies with characters in Dickens novels. Even though most of us weren’t forced to work as bootblacks at four years old, somehow we still feel disenfranchised and misused in the same way that Oliver Twist or David Copperfield were. By exaggerating my own childhood sense of disenfranchisement into the image of the orphan or feral child, I create an emotionally useful container.

LM: The other Motherless Brooklyn link here is Buddhism. Why bring back the Zendo setting? 

JL: It’s true, I’ve made the Buddhists into the bad guys twice. I have a lifelong undeveloped attraction to that mode of thinking, but I’m also such an agitated mind, such a loud, frantic person, that I just can’t imagine sitting still like that. Generationally, people my age, raised by hippies of various kinds, often have an axiomatic, punk-rock distrust of the Aquarian impulses. But I’m invested in those impulses, too. It’s like when you’re American and criticize everything about America—until you go to France, and suddenly you’re like, “We come from the land of freedom!” Every time somebody agrees with one of my characters that hippies are corrupt and useless, I’m like, “No, I’m a hippie.” I’m so invested in the things I make fun of. I love and hate countercultural impulses so deeply. I’m violently ambivalent, really. There’s no middle ground for me.

LM: What about Leonard Cohen, then? I have to admit that I was hoping he’d appear as a character in the book.

JL: He was thrust onto the book, really. Mount Baldy, where he spent his Zen retreat, is right above Claremont. Once I decided I would write an Inland Empire book, Mount Baldy was hovering over the novel. I wanted to write about the weird corners of the landscape where people go to retreat, and that’s Mount Baldy and Joshua Tree. Then, suddenly, Trump is elected and Leonard Cohen dies in the same week, and those two experiences of trauma become welded together in my mind. It was like an electrical bolt in my mind.

I couldn’t bring him onto the page, though. He would have had to have faked his death, and it would have made me feel seasick to claim that. Cohen worked so hard on his death! He crafted it. For a decade, he was making us and himself ready, and so it would have been taking away an extraordinary accomplishment to deny him that death. I just wish it hadn’t happened that week.

LM: How did you get yourself to write about Trump? 

JL: The subject is not wanting to think about Trump. Even though I don’t avoid his name—I name him, but I also use silly euphemisms, like the deal-whore—it’s about avoiding him. It’s about thinking the whole system is abhorrent, and he’s just a flagrant symptom. He’s the thumb in your eye, but everything’s wrong already. The state of existence was already corrupt and ruined. He’s just a cherry on top.

Of course, Phoebe runs away from him. She turns her back, and then runs into a space where the eternal allegorical nightmare of male and female is getting played out in a way she can’t flinch from. She has to participate. But I was running away, too. I was trying to write a book about Trump, and also trying to write a book despite him.

LM: Phoebe is right in the middle of every age relationship in the book. What does that mean to her, and you?

JL: In the book’s originating relationships, Phoebe is right between the mother and the daughter. First she’s friends with the mother, and then she realizes that she’s friends with Arabella, too. Writing about that was me trying to grapple with my own placement in time. I watched the Trump election happen to myself, my students, my children, my eighty-six-year-old father, who has been a political activist his entire life and has very tragic feelings about America. He might die with Trump as the last president he knows.

At this point, I realize that I’ve become a bridge in time. Human reality is changing, and people my age are in charge of accepting change, and straddling the contradictions we see. We have to shut up, look around, and think, Oh, this isn’t the world I remember.

LM: Every writer I talk to seems to have a personal politics of crime. What, to you, are the politics of the detective novel? 

JL: I’ve said this about Chandler for years: Marlowe is a character organically conceived to cut through American class boundaries. He’ll always go from the hothouses of the wealthy to the gambling dens or the gutter. He’s not stuck inside one class milieu, and so he makes the under-described fact that they exist but are quarantined from each other visible. That’s the politics inborn in creating a detective figure like that.

For me, the hard-boiled novel is also a machine for thinking about the end of the frontier. Whenever you think about California, you have to think about the results of the American westward-expansionist utopian dream. Utopia and dystopia nest inside each other out here.

LM: Would you say this is a utopian novel or a dystopian novel?

JL: I think about utopia-dystopia a lot, but I didn’t deliberately develop this book on those terms. It’s innate to the hard-boiled mode to ask what kind of city we’ve made here. So in The Feral Detective, we have a city with no buildings in the desert. All the figures are exposed, not cloaked in buildings or even in clothes. What kind of city have we made where there is no city, just men and women staring at each other? That’s the book’s question: We could have made whatever we wanted—but what the fuck did we make?

Author image credit: Amy Maloof