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A review by micaelabrody
The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem
adventurous
3.5
3.5 really. almost put this down because i was feeling pretty meh about it but it picked up when they got to the desert - glad i had a long bus ride to force me to really sit with it for a while instead of reading it in 5 page segments.
the big flaw in this book might not be its fault - but in 2022 the driving constant reminders of The Coastal Elite and Trump Country were a little bang-over-the-head. a lot of sentences that could have done without the “in the past year” or commentary about Americans. all of it felt a little discomfortingly like projected insecurity of a so-called Coastal Elite. “ordinary people might be the most terrifying thing on earth. or ordinary americans i should say” hasn’t aged well - the entire world saw a rightward shift - israel, india, britain, brazil, among others - and the exceptionalism in assuming that it’s just us is pretty outdated now.
anyway - the desert stuff and onwards was great, but honestly the first 1/3 of the book could have been much shorter. there was enough tourist journalism about trump country in 2016-7 to fill several novels - it was pretty unnecessary and boring here when there was better stuff to get to.
the big flaw in this book might not be its fault - but in 2022 the driving constant reminders of The Coastal Elite and Trump Country were a little bang-over-the-head. a lot of sentences that could have done without the “in the past year” or commentary about Americans. all of it felt a little discomfortingly like projected insecurity of a so-called Coastal Elite. “ordinary people might be the most terrifying thing on earth. or ordinary americans i should say” hasn’t aged well - the entire world saw a rightward shift - israel, india, britain, brazil, among others - and the exceptionalism in assuming that it’s just us is pretty outdated now.
anyway - the desert stuff and onwards was great, but honestly the first 1/3 of the book could have been much shorter. there was enough tourist journalism about trump country in 2016-7 to fill several novels - it was pretty unnecessary and boring here when there was better stuff to get to.