Precedented

Though it may not look it at first glance, Jonathan Lethem’s The Feral Detective is a noir novel through and through. We see no mean streets of the big city, spending plenty of time on the mountain roads of rural California instead, and as many major scenes take place in the daytime as at night. But plenty of the old noir tropes are visible from the start: we open on a quick-witted young woman with nowhere else to turn, seeking out a mysterious private eye with a dark backstory and acting instantly on their palpable romantic chemistry. Before we know it, we’re in the heavily stylized territory of neo-noir detective fiction.

In his style-defining 1972 essay “Notes on Film Noir,” screenwriter-director Paul Schrader defined noir not as a literary or cinematic genre, but as a collection of narrative and visual motifs that combine to define a distinctive tone. And chief among the cultural influences that gave rise to noir, Schrader argues, is “post-war disillusionment,” a reaction to the Depression and, immediately after World War II, the difficulty of acclimation to peacetime. Schrader characterizes noir as a response to national trauma, though he doesn’t use that term to directly. Disillusionment takes shape as “[t]he war continues, but now the antagonism turns with a new viciousness toward the American society itself.” But what does a noir novel have to say when the upheaval that creates the darkness as its core is not as evenly felt as the Depression or World War II? What happens when that distress isn’t even considered distressing at all by some of the novel’s characters, let alone over sixty-two million American voters?

The trauma that animates The Feral Detective, as it opens a week before Inauguration Day 2017, is the bombshell of the 2016 presidential election, which has left narrator Phoebe Siegler reeling. A former employee of The New York Times who quit suddenly (and won the Internet for a day for it) after the newsroom’s then widely publicized meeting with the election’s eventual winner, Phoebe travels from New York to Southern California in search of Arabella Swados, a missing friend and recent college dropout who is also the daughter of her mentor. There she enlists the services of Charles Heist, the title investigator, whom the urbanite Phoebe accompanies through California deserts and mountains, far from the city landscapes she can navigate on her own. (In addition to The Feral Detective’s noir trappings, this dynamic also makes this the second Lethem novel, after Girl in Landscape [1998], to function as an extended riff on John Ford’s The Searchers [1956], a film that has long been a touchstone for Lethem —and, I might add, for Schrader.)

Phoebe and Heist find Arabella, now living with “off-the-gridders” known as the Rabbits, a female-led group and rivals of a male-led similar group called the Bears. Before a schism, they were both part of a hippie commune; Lethem makes the two factions a microcosm of how entrenched polarization has replace the utopian promise of America. Heist, raised in the Bears until he left them as a teenager, returns to both sects on occasion to escort out any minors who wish to leave either group. Greeted as the apostate that he is, the Bears force Heist into a fight to the death against their current leader, a macho type with the arch-individualist name Solitary Love. Unable to countenance any longer an assault on her investigative and romantic partner, Phoebe intervenes, throwing off Solitary Love with the self-defense air-horn from her purse, giving Heist all the opportunity he needs to finish the job. Of course, in so doing, she essentially aids and abets a murder.

In earlier noir novels, Lethem treated actual detective plots largely as entry points into playing with genre tropes — not that there’s anything wrong with that. Gun with Occasional Music (1994) attempted to see if detective fiction...