 | A WRITER'S WIT |  A. Austin |
MY BOOK WORLD
Lethem, Jonathan. The Feral Detective. New York: HarperCollins, 2018.
Manhattanite Phoebe Siegler agrees to help find the missing daughter of friend. Arabella, being a freshman at Reed College on the west coast, has been missing for three months but now may be in southern California. Phoebe hires Charles Heist whom she right away calls the feral detective, mainly because he himself seems wild, part of the high desert milieu of Joshua Tree environs. His “profession,” if one wants to call it that, is to find missing children and youth, and Phoebe not only interests him in the case but in having rather bumbling sex with her as well.
This book reads quickly mainly because many chapters are only a paragraph or a page long. Seems a waste of the publisher’s paper supply to leave entire pages blank. But anyway . . . Phoebe and Charles embark on a trip into the mountains in which they are indeed successful in locating Arabella and secreting her out of the community of Rabbits (women hippies) and Bears (not-gay hairy men) who seem to run roughshod over this desert-mountainous area. Phoebe escorts Arabella back to New York and her mother via commercial flight, but Phoebe now seems to become the feral detective because Charles is “lost,” and she must find him. His rescue is a wild and wooly affair, but Phoebe is successful, and the denouement of this novel is a soft landing compared to where it has been. Still, an enjoyable read.
Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Allen Ginsberg
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THURS: A Writer's Wit | Bill Moyers
FRI: My Book World | Matthew Stadler, Allan Stein: A Novel
Manhattanite Phoebe Siegler agrees to help find the missing daughter of friend. Arabella, being a freshman at Reed College on the west coast, has been missing for three months but now may be in southern California. Phoebe hires Charles Heist whom she right away calls the feral detective, mainly because he himself seems wild, part of the high desert milieu of Joshua Tree environs. His “profession,” if one wants to call it that, is to find missing children and youth, and Phoebe not only interests him in the case but in having rather bumbling sex with her as well.
This book reads quickly mainly because many chapters are only a paragraph or a page long. Seems a waste of the publisher’s paper supply to leave entire pages blank. But anyway . . . Phoebe and Charles embark on a trip into the mountains in which they are indeed successful in locating Arabella and secreting her out of the community of Rabbits (women hippies) and Bears (not-gay hairy men) who seem to run roughshod over this desert-mountainous area. Phoebe escorts Arabella back to New York and her mother via commercial flight, but Phoebe now seems to become the feral detective because Charles is “lost,” and she must find him. His rescue is a wild and wooly affair, but Phoebe is successful, and the denouement of this novel is a soft landing compared to where it has been. Still, an enjoyable read.
Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Allen Ginsberg
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Ruth Westheimer
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Bill Moyers
FRI: My Book World | Matthew Stadler, Allan Stein: A Novel
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