Phoebe enlists the help of the private eye in question, Charles Heist, early on and their relationship drives the book — sometimes powerfully, sometimes off the road. Heist is “feral” in the sense that he’s rootless, unpredictable and hairy. He’s about 20 years older than Phoebe. There’s a freaky tween girl sleeping in his office until he can find a safe place for her and an opossum with a urinary tract infection residing in one of his desk drawers. Phoebe is both intrigued and repulsed by Heist. Having seen movies, you will recognize this as the prelude to soulful sex in the detective’s sketchy trailer.

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Lethem’s chief metaphor in “The Feral Detective” finds the “wild edge” of Los Angeles — i.e., the city’s proximity to the ocean and mountains — standing in for all that’s volatile and unknown beneath the surface of society. An acquaintance of Phoebe’s announces this theme in neon: “You can feel the civilization as this kind of thin layer that’s just been troweled onto the landscape. It’s, like, everything’s provisional.” (That’s a Didion-esque passage, of course; she hovers overs this novel like an archangel.) Phoebe shadows Heist on an ugly, downward-spiraling search for Arabella. They question dispossessed men and women living in tunnels, stumble on a ritualistic double murder atop Mount Baldy and descend into the thick of two tense, nomadic tribes in the desert. One tribe, called the Rabbits, is largely female and vegan; the other, the Bears, has more of a Hells Angels vibe. The plot is high on incident but feels meandering and oddly tension-less for the first half of the book. And Phoebe —

Phoebe can be a problem. She’s our guide and conscience, yet Lethem colors her character in so slowly that she’s on the edge of a breakdown before we can grasp who she is. Phoebe is sarcastic and occasionally vulgar. She makes dangerous choices. She loathes Heist for his taciturn masculinity, then yearns to jump him again: “I wanted to slap him, but I might have damaged the tender flesh of my hand on his die-cut features, his Brillo sideburns.” At times, she seems less like somebody destabilized by the new political order and more like somebody tapering off Zoloft. It’s not a sexist portrayal, but in a blind taste test you would know that this book was written by a man. Phoebe appears to be a mouthpiece for Lethem’s own rage, and she’s not an especially convincing portrait of a woman. It’s not enough to have her use the word “menstrual” and read Elena Ferrante.

As for the feral detective, he’s an enigma by design. The true mystery of the novel is not what became of Arabella (which proves anticlimactic), but who Charles Heist is and how his life story intersects with the history of the Rabbits and Bears. Phoebe tries to plumb the detective’s depths with both charm and fury, but she’s out of her element: “Soon Heist was silent while I railed at him, amid empty hills born to swallow human language, carved by time to make my protests small.”

Halfway through the novel, Lethem just about switches genres on us as Phoebe and Heist are drawn into a gladiatorial battle in the desert involving the Bear clan and its throne. Lethem has taken us so far from the liberal bubble so fast that you’ve either got to go with it or go home. Go with it. Even the author seems to know that he’s pushed the plot over the top because he punctures the savagery with humor, as when Phoebe screams at the Bears watching the fight, telling them they’re insane and demanding to know if they even voted. At its best, though, “The Feral Detective” is a worthy morality play about our warring impulses for conflict and comfort. It asks who we are when we lose, or cast away, everything that was propping us up.