I should've read this in 2020. It would've suited the mood of that plague-stopped world perfectly.

Since I didn't, I read the book without any frisson whatsoever. As always with Lethem's writing, the sentences pass with their unshowy but tremendously high level of craftsmanship causing them to slide directly into your brain. This, despite every character being pretty much...average. They don't stand out; they aren't meant to. This is a cozy catastrophe, not a Hero's Journey. I don't know if that was Author Lethem's intent but it's what we got.

The most vivid presence, the one truly blaringly alive character, isn't the blah "Journeyman"...an ycleture entirely self-generated as no one addresses or refers to the main character by that name...but Todbaum (literally "death tree") the thinly-veiled satirical caricature of 45. Plowing through the landscape, crushing all remaining shelter and destroying the livelihoods of all unlucky enough to be in his way, his nuclear-powered engine of destruction was made before the catastrophe of The Arrest so is the only surviving example of technology that Lethem posits destroyed us. Now, in the post-Arrest world, people are clueless and helpless. Then here comes Todbaum to destroy them anew with his sociopathic indifference and hoarded tech.

Pretty on-the-nose as a caricature of 45, but equally applicable to the billionaire class and their survival bunkers as a whole.

What would've worked better for me, personally, in 2020 was the laying-bare of the then-president's sociopathy before January 6th, 2021, rendered fiction about his toxicity irrelevant to the point of becoming distasteful. I was mildly amused, and always entertained, by the story. I was never inside it, or moved to want more of it. I read the book and appreciated the author's skill. I didn't invest in anyone inside the story but watched passively as events happened to and around them.

In a way I suppose this is as close as I can get to the experience of people who consume stories by staring at them on TV. I accepted what I was shown. I never once thought about whys, or hows, or what-ifs. What's here is all there is. This is not my preference, to be honest; it leaves me outside and while I expect that was the point, I didn't enjoy it much.

For me, this was a case of wishy meets washy in a beige future world that's too much and not enough like the present for it to work as allegory, satire, or parable. I'd be angry and upset with it, except that it's too well-made, too craftsmanlike, to truly disappoint that much. While it delivers what it promises it will, it doesn't delight the way Author Lethem most assuredly can.

This is a great look at the bizarre ways people might cope with a massive EMP-like end to technology. Lethem explores various ways of rebuilding, leading to some true cyberpunk-type concoctions and creative takes on the mistrust of society, ways people group themselves, and how they deal with the new outsiders.

This isn't really my kind book, so I'm not the ideal reviewer. It was. well written and moved quickly but I'd say it's bit more literary than what I usually read.

Vintage Lethem where the characters and setting is quirky. A sci-fi/earth bound near future where things have changed, but much remains the same.

That being said, vintage Lethem just doesn't interest me like it used to. I found the book to be stagnant overall. The characters were tough to root for/find commonality with. Or maybe they commonality was there but I didn't like what it said about me. There is no big overall story other then how the arrival or a new character to this enclave of people living after the arrest upends their lives in various ways. There are shades of the Wicker Man in reverse where you're with the town and its residents. But again, it just felt like their problems where very "so what."

Lesser Lethem.

I really wanted to like this one, but I'm afraid I have to DNF. The story was okay, but it didn't capture me and I had such high hopes because of the author.

I started reading this book and found that it was not for me. It didn't seem fair for me to review a book that I didn't finish.

I very much enjoyed this story. It was wonderfully written. I look forward to the author’s next book!

Post-apocalyptic, gigantic titanium tank on the cover? Oh I’m definitely going to pick that one up.

When the apocalypse happened, which everyone refers to as “The Arrest,” all electronics, engines, and machines stopped working. Sandy was visiting with his sister Maddy on her organic farm in Maine, which is a pretty ideal spot to hunker down. The nearby towns form a makeshift community where each person has a task. Before the Arrest Sandy worked with slimy-ish Peter Todbaum in Hollywood and they also went to college together. One day everyone is minding their own business and Todbaum rolls into town in the gigantic vehicle on the cover and everything starts to change.

Between this, The Silence, and Leave the World Behind, there have been several dystopian genre books when technology just stops chugging along. If I had to rank them (which literally no one is asking me to), I would put Leave the World Behind as first, The Arrest as second, and The Silence as third.

There are a lot of great flashbacks from before The Arrest that helps to fill in the blanks on the relationships between Peter, Sandy, Maddy. Although, I never felt like I understood the sister. She was a bit of a mystery.

I thought this book was super original and had a Vonnegut sort of vibe to it. Unfortunately, the pacing felt disjointed at times and I felt like I was missing something, which made me re-read chapters now and then, but I think that’s just how it’s written. It gets slow in the middle, but it is so worth it to plow through until the ending, trust me on this. I loved the complete absurdity and ingenuity of the ending.

Thanks to @netgalley for the chance to review this. Pick this one up if you like dystopian lit that isn’t too bleak and books that have huge metal tanks on them.

Just finishing reading this, and really enjoyed this book. In a world where things stop working, what would happen. #TheArrest #NetGalley

Published by HarperCollins/Ecco on November 10, 2020

Integral to the story Jonatham Lethem tells in The Arrest is a nuclear-powered supercar called Blue Streak, apparently inspired by nostalgia for a past that imagined the wondrous future of technology. Unlike Blue Streak, most technology in this near future novel has stopped working. Like the power failure in Don DeLillo’s The Silence, the source of this calamity is the subject of speculation rather than explanation. And like DeLillo, Lethem takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to how characters respond to the collapse of the familiar.

The Arrest started with the loss of television, which “contracted a hemorrhagic ailment” that led to the brief return of Family Ties and news of the Vietnam War before it died completely. Email and social media suffered “colony collapse disorder.” Guns worked for almost a year before gunpowder stopped igniting. In the absence of connectivity, the United States was replaced by wherever you happened to be. Technology gave way to solar dehydrators and rooftop rain collectors. Why the Blue Streak (which was assembled from a tunnel boring machine) still works is a mystery to everyone.

Journeyman (a/k/a Alexander Duplessis or Sandy) lives with his sister Madeleine on her farm that operates as a commune. Three towns near the farm occupy a peninsula in Maine. Journeyman’s role in this new world is to bring food and supplies to Jerome Kormetz, a child molester who has been exiled by agreement to a lakeside cabin. He also delivers food to the Cordon, whose members had probably fancied themselves to be a militia before their guns stopped working. The Cordon have formed a perimeter, supposedly to protect the peninsula from attack by New Hampshire. The Cordon are actually more interested in intimidating peninsula residents to assure that the Cordon are fed.

In his pre-collapse life, Journeyman pounded out screenplays for his friend Peter Todbaum, a Hollywood producer who has the ability to pitch but not to create. He made a good living pitching ideas that Journeyman turned into scripts and then pitching the scripts to studios. They were working on a movie about a dystopian future called Yet Another World before the Arrest. Todbaum wanted Journeyman to cobble it together from classic works of post-apocalyptic fiction. As it references those works, the novel takes a well-deserved shot at Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, an example of the caveman version of the genre.

Todbaum visits Journeyman after the Arrest, driving the Blue Streak cross country from Malibu, intuiting that Journeyman would have gone to ground with Madeleine, with whom Todbaum once had an ambiguous relationship, or at least an ambiguous encounter, before Madeleine fell in love with a Somalian refugee named Astur. Todbaum apparently riled up a good many people during his trek, behavior that the commune members regard as unhealthy for the commune. Exactly what Todbaum saw during his journey is unclear. He tells a character named Gorse that America has been completely destroyed, then tells Gorse that their peninsula in Maine is actually part of an experimental biosphere that has been cut off from civilization. The truth is likely to be entirely different, but Gorse will never know.

The plot involves a conflict between Todbaum and the Cordon as well as a conflict between Todbaum and members of the commune who seek refuge from Todbaum and from the Cordon on “an island at the end of land and time.” A mysterious tower on the island becomes a focal point of those conflicts.

Readers might expect novels about the loss of technology to illustrate dependence on technology, but Lethem has traveled beyond allegorical expectations. The Arrest seems to suggest that it’s time to move past the apocalypse and to begin rebuilding on the assumption that it is already upon us. Todbaum discusses and Journeyman frequently ponders “the worth of ritual action”: pillaging, human sacrifice, “the destructive impulse.” Kormetz tells Journeyman he grasps too little of that human need. Perhaps Lethem wants us to understand that we ignore it at our peril.

The Arrest was so different from my expectations that I had to start it three times before I began to wrap my head around it. I kept coming back to it because Lethem wrote it and he’s never disappointed me. When I finally got into it I discovered that, for all its humor, it requires a close reading. Contrary to appearances, this isn’t a light novel. I’m certain it’s a novel I don’t entirely understand. I think Lethem is saying, as does a minor character, that the structure of society doesn’t matter much because “bullshit power games” will erupt in even the most egalitarian communities. The communal peninsula might be a citadel or it might be a prison. That same character tells Journeyman to “tell the truth in what you write,” advice that frightens Journeyman because he doesn’t want to arouse contempt. In the end, perhaps the truth, or a search for truth, is all we have. That, at least, is the message that I took from this puzzling but amusing novel.

RECOMMENDED

I received this free book to review from Netgalley. Wow! What an interesting book. We take so many things for granted. It reminds me of what we are going through now! Scary, but sometimes we are truly not ready fir something to happen.

The Arrest is a dystopian, science-fiction novel about what happens when all the technology we use on a daily basis stops working during an event that is known in the book as “the arrest”. Everything from phones to cars, even guns, stop working after some time. The novel follows Sandy Duplessis, more often referred to as Journeyman, and his life following the arrest. He is living on his sister’s farm, working as a deliveryman and butcher’s assistant, when his old roommate from his life as a screenwriter in LA comes to town driving a nuclear powered SuperCar.

Right off the bat, I noticed that the similarities between this book and mid-20th-century sci-fi books didn’t end at the cover. Lethem’s prose reminded me a lot of classic, older books that I had to read for school. The diction is complex, and at points seemed almost pretentious, especially at the beginning. Though, it did start to flow better as I read and got used to the writing style, with the occasional hiccup. While Lethem’s writing style isn’t my favorite, I don’t think it took away from my experience with the book. There were quite a few times while reading that I really enjoyed Lethem’s writing, but I know it’s not for everyone.

While this book is often labelled as dystopian and sci-fi, it’s really not. The premise of the book is where the sci-fi elements begin and end. The event, the arrest, and the SuperCar, melt into the background as the story focuses on Journeyman’s reunion with his old friend, Peter Todbaum. To me, The Arrest is a sci-fi novel in the same way that George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a sci-fi novel. Both books contain sci-fi elements, but that’s not what they’re about, the sci-fi elements just provide a setting.

Now let’s talk about the characters. The story is told from the perspective of Journeyman, however, he is probably one of the least interesting characters in the book. After Peter Todbaum’s arrival, he takes the spotlight, and is a much more interesting character. Most of the book is spent having Journeyman try to compare the Todbaum he knew in the past to the one that showed up in the present: a phenomenon Lethem calls “Time Averaging”. Todbaum’s larger-than-life presence feels like it should be a foil to Journeyman’s, but in this regard I think Journeyman falls a bit flat.

Journeyman has got to be one of the most oblivious main characters I’ve ever read. Much of the plot happens, only for Journeyman to find out about it later. Todbaum’s attempts to reconcile with Journeyman’s sister is followed by chapters of Journeyman trying to figure out what happened between them in the past. There were many times where I felt like Journeyman should have been aware of something that was happening or was about to happen, but he just wasn’t.

That brings me to probably my biggest gripe with the book. A lot of the story is displaced from the main character, making it seem cryptic and more mysterious. To me it ultimately just felt superficial. There were a lot of elements throughout the book that felt like they should have more meaning than they did. Journeyman’s relationships with characters, the SuperCar, and even the events of the plot seemed like they were all metaphors for something. However, if they were metaphorical, any ascribed meanings were lost on me, although I don’t claim to be the smartest man. What I can say, though, is they did help highlight the absurdity of the story taking place in a post-civilized society.

While I did enjoy my time with The Arrest, I’m not sure I will think about it much after. The pacing was slow, and ultimately not much ended up happening throughout the book. The characters could have had more depth, but there is a weird air of mystery that Lethem seemed insistent on keeping his characters in. Overall, I think most would find this book a little dull, though I found moments throughout that kept me interested if not engaged. Perhaps this story is just like the character Peter Todbaum— full of flowery language, but not much beyond that.

FULL REVIEW: https://www.thepapertavern.com/reviews/the-arrest/

If Jonathan Franzen were to write a post-apocalyptic novel, it might be something like this. Many people would consider a comparison to Jonathan Franzen a compliment. I am not one of them. If I want disaffected modern Americans with an unhealthy amount of ennui in my fantasy novels, I’ll stick to Lev Grossman. He does it much better, and I feel like I’m *supposed* to want to punch Quentin in the face.

This is set in present-day Maine, but in a world where technology abruptly stopped working - this would be the titular “Arrest.” No explanation is given, which I’m actually fine with - that’s what the book is about. The protagonist is Alexander Duplessis, known to most as Sandy. When the Arrest happened, he was visiting his sister on her organic farm on the coast of Maine. Given the area’s pre-Arrest propensity towards affluent crunch-granola hippies, they weathered the transition more than most. The protagonist’s sister, for example, pretty much just rolled up her sleeves and kept doing what she was doing. They have a nice little idyllic community going, truth be told; Sandy’s skills as a screenwriter aren’t really in demand, but he finds a niche as assistant butcher and general delivery man.

Things take an interesting turn when an old “friend” of the protagonist (and incidental one-night-stand of the protagonist’s sister) arrives in a nuclear powered supercar, the only piece of technology that’s working. He’s asking for the protagonist and his sister, but no one knows why, nor why he crossed the country to find them.

So now we get into the pretentious stuff, and everything that is clearly supposed to be have *meaning*. The protagonist refers to himself as “Journeyman,” but he’s never told anyone this nickname as far as I could tell. Among the deliveries he makes is food supplies to a local pedophile, exiled from the town proper for his crimes, who considers Journeyman his only friend and talks with him a lot about classical Japanese books. There’s a woman who moved into the library; Journeyman doesn’t know her name, but he’s got a crush on her. Journeyman, as I said, is an ex-screenwriter, who specialized in converting failing projects into soulless things that make some kind of profit. His friend is a Hollywood producer with distinct Harvey Weinstein vibes. I could go on and on and on. It’s all meant to be so *deep*, so *symbolic*, and it just left me feeling so *pissed off* (except for Journeyman’s friend, who left me wanting a shower, but that was clearly the author’s intention).

Throw in way too much space devoted to decrying modern life, with its Facebook likes and search engine optimization and e-books and email and digital watches and the no-good kids with their hippity-hop music and pants falling down (Franzen’s schtick, in other words) and I just felt so, so patronized.

Would not recommend, but hey, if you like Franzen and you like spec fic, maybe this’ll be for you.

Excellent, and timely post-apocalyptic novel . Speculative fiction not based in Brooklyn from the author of Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude.

This book just didn't quite do it for me. Lethem is obviously a skilled writer; his control and intentionality with words was really the only thing that held the book together for me. His writing was minimal, but not in a spare or austere way. Rather, he seemed very selective and surprising in the details he chose to embellish. This, coupled with the very short chapters (some no more than a page) with varying tones and organization, made for an unusual read. But these stylistic novelties only seemed to highlight for me the fact that the story dragged a bit, and none of the characters were particularly likeable, which made it hard for me to invest myself. Add to that the underwhelming climax, and you have what amounted to a short, post-apocalyptic "slice of life" of sorts, only not a very tasty one. This may come down to personal preference. The tone was humorous and sardonic, but never quite funny enough to make me laugh. And the half-serious tonality prevented the kind of deep, touching, poignancy I typically look for in a "slice-of-life" story. However, it was a well-written, metafictional, and very odd take on some of the tropes of the subgenre, so it may be just what some are in the mood for. I waffled between 2 and 3 stars, but settled on 3 for the interesting structure and quality of writing.

3 stars; Worth a shot, but if you don't like it after 50 pages, you probably won't like it after you're finished.

Lethem's The Arrest follows a group of people stranded in a sort of rural utopia in Maine where Sandy Duplessis, a.k.a. Journeyman is a handyman in the community, assisting people in their daily lives. Their lives are upended by an unexplained event, presumably apocalyptic, referred only as the Arrest. When Journeyman's erstwhile friend Todbaum, from his previous life, shows up with a nuclear powered supercar, he sets the cat among the pigeons. The ensuing tension forms the crux of the book's plot. At one point Lethem alludes to the possibility that the population is stuck in an "experimental preserve." At another, he takes a dig at McCarthy's The Road: "If McCarthy were honest, he'd admit he wrote a campfire story." Is Lethem's The Arrest sci-fi or post-apocalyptic dystopian fiction or simply social satire? It's hard to categorise, nevertheless, there's plenty in the book to relish.

"...he might simply be lonely. Journeyman was crazy with loneliness or lonely with craziness...some days Journeyman thought the world had been crazy and tried to go sane: that was The Arrest."

I think the above is as close as I came to understanding The Arrest by Jonathan Lethem. The book is about an event referred to as The Arrest where all technology just stopped one day around the world. There are no cell phones, TV, or microwave ovens. We never really learn what caused the event.

Sandy aka Journeyman use to be a Hollywood screenwriter doctor who helped scripts be made into movies. Now there are no movies and he lives a quiet life in Maine with his sister helping her on her farm and delivering supplies to locals. All that changes when his old boss shows up driving a nuclear powered car and turns Sandy's life upside-down.

The author sublimely makes important points about how technology has taken over our lives, how people should be together and not adrift from one another, and how we find ways to survive despite all the obstacles in our way.

The book reminded me of the movie Mad Max but if everyone was very a little less angry and more mellow. Sandy is our quiet hero and there are some bad guys who want the powerful car and that's the major conflict.

The writer tells his story in very short crisp sentences. This method can often work when trying to make a point but for a whole book I found it distracting to read. I know some elements probably went over my head but what I did decipher kept me confusingly entertained most of the time.

I received a free copy of this book from the publishers via NetGalley for a fair and honest review. All opinions are my own.

Even if it's well written I couldn't get into the story as I found it a bit too slow and dull.
Not my cup of tea.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

There are few authors out there who can match Jonathan Lethem when it comes to literary genre-bending. Just a handful are even close – and none are better. He has long been a proponent of embracing the possibilities inherent to genre exploration, leading to work that is insightful, engaging … and wildly entertaining.

His latest effort is “The Arrest,” a post-apocalyptic tale that offers a glimpse at one possible ending for civilization as we know it. Neither a utopia nor a dystopia, but something in between, Lethem’s landscape is one is thoughtful and laugh-out-loud funny. It’s a story of survival and isolation, a story about what it means to live in a society.

It’s a condemnation of overreliance on technology that also pokes fun at those who view tech as some shadowy all-encompassing bogeyman. By viewing the world through the lens shaped by the titular event, Lethem peels back the layers and gives us a glimpse of what we might try to put together if everything fell apart.

One day, with no warning, technology stopped working. Some things stopped immediately, while others gradually petered out, but the ultimate result is the same. Cars, computers, cell phones, guns – none of it works anymore. Television’s past and present bled together. Internet communication suffered a variation on colony collapse disorder. Planes fell from the sky and smart devices became paperweights. It was an ending with neither an explanation nor the means to derive one.

Journeyman lives in a small coastal Maine town called Tinderwick, situated on a peninsula. Once a reasonably successful screenwriter (well, script doctor, really) named Sandy Duplessis, he was visiting his sister Maddy at her organic farm when the event – called “the Arrest” by these folks – took place. Unable to get back to California or, well … anywhere, really … he winds up working as a sort of deliveryman, bringing supplies to various people across the area. He also assists the local butcher, among other tasks.

Journeyman is one of the few that has regular interactions with people outside the general community. He’s the one tasked with delivering food to the exiled Jerome Kormentz, living alone at the Lake of Tiredness as punishment for his sins. He’s also one of the few community members to engage with riders from the Cordon, the vaguely-organized militia that served as the self-styled protectors of the peninsula (for a modest payment of food, of course).

But then a figure from his old life reappears.

Peter Todman was Journeyman’s Yale classmate and early writing partner, but Todman’s combination of ruthlessness and charisma eventually led him to a steadily-rising spot in the studio system. He became one of the most influential figures in Hollywood, a mover and shaker who got movies made – a status that certainly gave Sandy a leg up in the business. There’s also the small matter of conflict between Todman and Maddy – a conflict that neither has ever seen fit to explain. Journeyman assumed he’d never see Todman again – right up until his old friend shows up looking for him.

Perhaps even more remarkable than Todman’s appearance is how he arrives – behind the wheel of a massive contraption of blinking lights and metal, a Supercar of sorts, heavily armed and armored and powered by a self-contained nuclear reactor. By asking for Journeyman (as well as Maddy), Todman immediately ensures that the Duplessis siblings are inextricably tied to him.

Initially, Todman’s presence is welcome, but it isn’t long before questions begin to arise – on all sides – regarding what it is that he’s after. Todman’s a talker, willing to tell people what they want to hear, whether it is a tale of his harrowing journey across the continent or a wild plan to make an escape south to Brunswick and beyond, so it isn’t easy for Journeyman to discern what it is his old friend really wants. And when Todman’s presence starts to elevate tensions and invite hostilities from both within the town and from those living outside it, no one is at all sure what needs to be done – or what can be done.

“The Arrest” is a sprawling story of the post-apocalypse, an interesting exploration of the idea that rather than some sort of all-encompassing dystopia, people would simply end up wherever they happened to be when the end arrived. There is no overarching command structure, no continent-spanning armies or stronghold strongmen. Just people left where they were, adapting to the new reality and coming together to survive.

Lethem’s considerable talent for adapting and subverting speculative tropes is apparent throughout this book, so it’s no surprise that he’s able to come up with an interesting post-apocalyptic landscape, one that completely blows up the expectations two decades of sci-fi have laid out for us. He’s got a knack for flawed characters, too, people who are smart but solipsistic, capable of much but undermined by their own self-involvement. The Journeyman/Todman juxtaposition is illustrative of that evocation of the flawed – two sides of the same coin. All of this comes together in a narrative that embraces the insularity of its setting while also capturing the scale of the catastrophe.

“The Arrest” is a speculative wonder, a joyfully shaggy and unapologetic page-turner of a tale. It is that rare work that manages to be both optimistic and pessimistic at the same time, somehow evoking all sides of what happens after the end. Simultaneously a celebration and condemnation of human nature, it’s a compelling read from one of his generation’s finest writers.

Jonathan Lethem's The Arrest is an odd take on a muted post-apocalyptic future after The Arrest, an extended event during which all tech, from TV to the internet to cell phones, stop working. The protagonist, Alexander "Sandy" Dupless is left stranded (vehicles using conventional fuel don't work either) up in New England near his sister, Maddy Duplessis, and her organic farm commune (which is a generous term for it, given how feudal it all seems) in Maine. At one time, before The Arrest, Sandy and his former roommate from Yale, Peter Todbaum, we're living out in Hollywood, trying to write the greatest post-apocalyptic dystopian screenplay ever. A brief encounter between Todbaum and Maddy seems to have set off a series of changes and ultimately Sandy, who was deeply unsettled by his sister's involvement with Todbaum, has landed in Maine, working as a journeyman (think more like a UPS delivery guy, delivering food, news, and more) in their small community which tries to thrive despite the titular Arrest. And it was all going along swimmingly, for the most part, until Todbaum shows up in a vehicle called The Blue Streak (think a nuclear-powered tank) asking for Sandy and Maddy and setting off a fatal chain of events.

There are elements of this story, including its gentle apocalypse that has ended modern life as we know it, that offer great bones for a story. The characters here left me cold sadly, and I honestly struggled to finish the novel, finally buying the audiobook to do so. Lethem's prose is always sharp-edged and crisp, but sometimes I just have difficulty feeling engaged with his characters. I didn't really like anyone in the novel other than the elusive secondary character Drenka. That lack of caring made it hard for me to care about what would happen to the principal characters and the novel's outcome.

The audiobook is nicely narrated by Robert Fass.

I received a digital review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.