Jonathan Lethem wrote a mystery novel,The Feral Detective, to beat his Trump blues.
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DID YOU FUCKERS EVENVOTE?
Lethem had been conjuringThe Feral Detectivesince 2014, letting it percolate in the way that novels often do.
Returning to the detective framework could also help corral his expansive thematic ambitions.
So I cut that down to size by imposing this very firm template.
To me, the hard-boiled detective story is almost like a sonnet.
In the fall of 2016, he was more or less on track to start writing the novel.
I was teaching, so I thought,Ill start it at winter break.Cut to: the election.
My material looked dead to me.
I was in a stunned and miserable condition.
Then he revisited his material and had a revelation.
It wasnt a grandiose feeling.
He reimagined the main action as taking place over ten days around Trumps swearing-in.
There was no way I would presume the novel could encompass anything about our situation, he says.
And that will be enough.
Harvard, Hillary, Trump, the New YorkTimes.
While stranded in a hotel waiting for the detective, she ponders her options.
Television had elected itself, I figured.
It could watch itself too, for all I cared.
Reading fiction since 2016 has felt, for the most part, like an exercise in escapism.
He says that reading J.R.R.
Tolkien and Philip Pullman out loud to his sons reconnected him to the power of figures moving across space.
Basically, the Tolkien books are just a long walk.
The Feral Detectivewill be published by Ecco on November 6.
