This novel from 2018 is set in the post Trump elected USA.
The novel is written in the first person voice of Phoebe a New Yorker. Phoebe, a journalist, had a nice NYC life as a Op Ed editor at the Times but just before the events in the novel decided to quit.
She has a good friend, Roslyn, who works at NPR. She is also friends, or thinks she is, with Roslyn’s college age daughter Arabella. Arabella has taken off from Reed College in Portland and has broken off contact with her mother, and Phoebe, causing the expected parental distress.
Newly footloose, jobless, and looking for SOMETHING anyway, Phoebe sets off for the wild west in search for Arabella. She follows a hunch that Arabella might have gone to Mount Baldy in California where there is a zen monastery where Leonard Cohen hung out for years (while his business manager ripped him off for millions). Phoebe has a NYCer’s disgust at the election of Trump who city people were all too familiar with for decades while unable to grok why people in the sticks, in the good old USA, love and worship him so. It is noted in the novel that Leonard Cohen died on election day 2016.
In seeking professional local help in the search for Arabelle, Phoebe hooks up with Charles Heist, The Feral Detective, and a wild adventure commences.
The novel can be looked upon as a contemplation of the politically and culturally binary nature of Trump’s USA. There are opposing cult and survivalist elements that make for an exciting and suspenseful adventure saga. Since the novel’s voice is a first person sophisticated NYC woman we share with her the wonderment, and sometimes threatening horror, of what and who she discovers out there in the California desert as well as how it all could be oddly appealing in a primal way.
Since Phoebe is a-seen-it-all New Yorker nothing is looked upon as all that ghastly through her descriptions, even though some of the events surely would be quite horrifying to witness first hand.
It’s all a wild ride though the still wild west and a welcome off the road and grid ride. Lethem’s not a Johnny One Note. His novels are all inventively different. This fact might upset some readers who will say, “This wasn’t like Fortress, Motherless, Chronic, Dissident, or Blot.”, but this reader delighted in it and traveling with one of our finest contemporary novels in a look at yet another viewing angle in the crazy world that is the USA.
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