Quirky, captivating and unique, The Arrest is an absolute ripper. Set in a dystopian near future, The Arrest is interesting and well-written and filled with fantastic characters and deeper themes. It has everything you'd want in a dystopian novel but more importantly than any of that, it's just so much fun.
The Arrest is wildly entertaining from start to finish and I could not recommend it more highly.

I went into 'The Arrest' with great hopes at finding a new love. It had the makings of something fascinating, my favourite of settings -an apocalypse. We enter a world where most technology has ceased to function, where a town has been isolated from the world for 5 years only to see the arrival of a bizarre and functioning vehicle... how could it go wrong?

Most unfortunately, this is a book in which neither the main character nor the reader had any idea of what was happening until slapped in the face with the resolution. The plot didn't happen to Journeyman, it didn't happen because of Journeyman; it happened around Journeyman. The most frustrating thing about this is that it had all the makings of something interesting and then did nothing with it. The ending was, for me, entirely foreseeable from about halfway through the book, and was entirely coordinated by other members of the town, and despite the labour he put into it he didn't bother to uncover what was actually going on.

Beyond an absolute lack of a plot, the protagonist also lacked a personality, seemingly existing only to bounce between his sister and Peter Todbaum - both of which would have made more interesting main characters. Even the local sex offender he made deliveries to was more compelling than Journeyman himself. Generally, I'm a fan of emotionally detached and neutral characters, but only when this apathy is accompanied by some sort of agency. Unfortuantely, Journeyman made no real attempt to become an active member of any story, let alone his own, making behind his self-designated title even more ridiculous.

This book wasn't for me, and I wouldn't recommend it. However, I would like to thank Netgalley and Johnathan Lethem for giving me an opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

Science-fiction author Brian Aldiss coined the term "cosy catastrophe", as a way to describe sci-fi stories in which a life-ending event wipes out most of human life, leaving a group of nice, middle-class white people to calmly and in relative comfort rebuild some sense of normalit (Aldiss was thinking of John Wyndham's work like The Day of the Triffids).

The Arrest is a cosy catastrophe. From one day to the next, all electronics and mechanical constructions have stopped working. Nobody really knows why,and there seems no way to reverse The Arrest, as it is known. To be fair, nobody in the book actually seems to want to reverse it, or even think about how it came to be, it has become the new normal.

The book takes place in a rural part of Maine, close to the ocean. Our main character, who refers to himself as the Journeyman (nobody ever calls him that), was visiting the hipster-y farm run by his sister Maddie, when The Arrest hit. A tight group of 'survivors' have banded together, and help eachother live a life of relative comfort. Their collection of farms is cordoned off by a more classically post-apocalyptic group, calling themselves The Cordon. As the farms also feed the Cordon, there's a tense sort of stand-off.

Then, out of nowhere, an old colleague of Journeyman's pre-Arrest life comes rolling into town - literally. Todman has a nuclear-powered car, that he had built before The Arrest, and he has come to bother Journeyman and his sister. Journeyman used to be a screenwriter, and he worked together with Todman.

And that's sort of the plot. Not a lot happens. It all sort of pootles along, and it's quite funny in a wry way. At it's best, it's pleasant, at it's worst just a little bit boring. Journeyman is a bit of a dork, which I quite like, but the other characters more or less stay ciphers, which is especially noticeable in Maddie, his sister.

There is an ending (believe me, that might come as a surprise when reading this book), but it feels a bit forced, and left me wondering what I just read. Which might appeal to you.

I really don't know what to make up of The Arrest. Approaching the novel, I expected a quirky old-fashioned dystopian novel (just look at that magnificent cover!). Yet, I soon understood that Jonathan Lethem's book is a whole other type of beast. Walking the fine line between earnestness and parody, The Arrest tells the story of a very different type of a post-apocalyptic world. In a way reminiscent of Shinobu Yaguchi's film Survival Family, the book examines a world and people brought down on their knees through something quite simple. There are no wars, no big cataclysm, just the gradual stop of all technology.

Still not quite sure what to make of this book. Is it a serious addition to the dystopian genre? Or a spoof? A serious exploration of a possible post-apocalyptic scenario? Or just a bit of fun? It’s possibly all of the above, and it’s certainly not as doom-laden as most dystopias – and much more amusing. Perhaps the intent doesn’t matter, anyway, because it’s a fun read and well-written, and a book that I found entertaining and enjoyable, original and inventive and if it left me with a lot of unanswered questions, well never mind. Essentially there’s been some sort of catastrophe, here called The Arrest. Life as we know it has ceased. Technology no longer works. Now only small local communities exist (we assume) and the novel is set in one of them, in Maine. Our narrator is Journeyman, once a Hollywood scriptwriter and now a butcher’s assistant and delivery boy. His sister runs a successful organic farm. Things aren’t too bad in the community, and they are protected by some bikers called The Cordon. Whether they actually need protection is another matter. Then one day an old colleague of Journeyman’s rolls in with a weird and wonderful nuclear-powered supercar and like all strangers coming into town, disrupts everything that has been established there. There are no revelations, we never learn what has happened, we never learn whether there are other communities, although Taubman, the maverick Hollywood film-maker has some tales to tell about the outside world. How unreliable he is, we never know. In fact we don’t know much at all. So is it a send-up of the genre? Lethem’s novels are never conventional, and this one certainly isn’t. Probably best not to overthink it but just go along for the ride. Which I did – and had a good time en route .

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

Or How We Got Along After The Wifi Went Down. The Arrest is an ambiguous utopia/dystopia in which advanced technology - from the internet to cars and guns - has all stopped working. At its simplest this is Lethem’s entry into the crowded canon of The Road, Station Eleven, Oryx and Crake and so on. As an avowed scifi reader Lethem also gives strong callbacks to post-apocalyptic classics such as Philip K. Dick’s Dr Bloodmoney and Walter M. Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz.

Unlike the irradiated hellholes, biological swamps or fascist regimes of many of these,
Lethem’s post-tech life - seen through the eyes of unreliable narrator Journeyman AKA former Hollywood screenwriter Sandy - is not so bad. Shorn of distractions such as Netflix and international travel, a small community in Maine ekes out a pretty sweet existence in which piles of sausages and hearty soups round the fire are the chief joys of life. Just as he was a journeyman writer Before The Fall - a polisher and fixer-upper of scripts - so he is now the Journeyman, assisting the butcher (bank manager pre-Arrest) and delivering parcels across the peninsula. The farmers - led by Sandy’s sister Maddie, a whiz with the organic mulch - also have a smoothly symbiotic relationship with the local roving biker gangs, The Cordon. They keep what is implied as a threatening wilderness beyond at bay, in exchange for produce from their communal post-Arrest Whole Foods. No cannibalism or rat-eating here. They even have some sort of civic justice sorted, as the one serious criminal is exiled to a Thoreau-esque cabin by the lake. So far, so rural bliss.

Lethem introduces the outsider, always a key plot point in post-apocalypse novels, in the most outrageous fashion - and it’s here that a more explicitly satirical intent surfaces. A gleaming atomic car - complete with espresso bar and single malts - arrives, piloted by Sandy’s old screenwriting buddy Todbaum who has turned his Hollywood millions into this gleaming vehicle. He sets up camp dispensing espressos and stories, as through flashbacks we see how Todbaum seduced Maddie, as his fireside chats now seduce the staid New Englanders. Further complicating the reality of this whole affair is that Todd, his car, and maybe even the whole Arrest, may have come about through an act of storytelling: a manifestation of an alternate-world sci-fi script that Todd and Sandy were working on.

Get past its stop-start plot, and at its best, The Arrest is about the power of storytelling to add sense and meaning to our lives - and the dark power it has in the wrong hands. Journeyman’s chief grumble about the post-Arrest world is that without stories every day is the same - a perpetual today. Exiled criminal Kromenz, writing his new version of The Pillow Book; enigmatic Denka guarding the library; and Todbaum spinning his absurd odyssey of travel across a shattered continent - join Journeyman in trying to find ways to create new stories.

This is a novel that self-consciously sets out to be odd, to jar us the readers out of the fixed lines of the post-apocalyptic tale. Does he succeed in blowing up the genre? Not quite, but he does point out the simplicity that lies behind the binary nature of so much dystopian fiction: it probably won’t be the best of times, but it won’t be the worst either.

When I read the description of this book I thought that it sounded interesting and showed promise of being a really good story.
Unfortunately I found it difficult to get into and I didn't get on with the characters very well. I struggled to finish reading it.
I have read and enjoyed a few dystopian/ post apocalyptic novels recently as they seem to be numerous and popular at the moment. This book sadly was not as good as some of the other books in this genre.
Thank you to Netgalley and the Publisher for my ARC.

This is one of those books that had me whispering "What is wrong with me?". I couldn't get into it. I found the plot dull, the characters dull, the writing was okay. Actually, the writing was probably better than okay, but I couldn't see past the plot and characters. It hasn't put me off reading more of Jonathan Lethem's work... in time. "The Arrest" just wasn't for me.

My thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley. This review was written voluntarily and is entirely my own, unbiased, opinion.

It seems everyone wants to write post-apocalyptic fiction at the moment. But Jonathan Lethem cannot be accused of just jumping on the bandwagon in 2020 for his 12th novel The Arrest. For example, his 1995 novel Amnesia Moon was a series of short stories based on different catastrophic and post-apocalyptic events. Lethem, probably best known for his detective story Motherless Brooklyn has been dabbling in speculative fiction throughout his career. Given that, in some ways The Arrest is a fairly standard post-apocalypse which Lethem uses, at one point to comment on our predilection for these narratives.
Sandy Duplessis, also known as Journeyman, fortunately found himself at his sister’s self-sufficient organic farm in Maine when the Arrest happened. The Arrest is the name for some unspecified event in which all electronic gadgets just stopped working. Journeyman lives now in a barter-based, fairly stable, agrarian society. The community is located on a peninsula and is protected by the sea on one side and a group of violent thugs who call themselves the Cordon from whom they buy protection with food. All is generally pretty settled and functioning, until his former toxic friend and later boss Peter Todbaum comes spectacularly back into his life. Peter arrives in the community behind the wheel of a giant, nuclear-powered self-sustaining vehicle which he claims to have driven across the country from Los Angeles. Peter quickly ensconces himself in the community, telling stories about his trip, handing out precious cups of coffee and building a small following. But Peter’s existence and particularly the dangers and opportunities presented by his super vehicle have disrupted the delicate balance that the community has established and things start to fall apart.
As with much literary post-apocalyptic fiction, Lethem is not interested in the details of the apocalypse so much as what his scenario says about modern culture and society. There is plenty of backstory that focusses on the movie and television industry and the superficiality of American society. This is juxtaposed by the locavore, self-sufficient, community-focussed world in which Journeyman finds himself. But there are always questions as to how sustainable that world is, and whether it is a new model of the norm or a flukish abonormality.
And behind all of this is a meta exploration of the role of post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction more broadly. Before the Arrest Sandy working for Peter as a script doctor. Peter himself was a producer whose grand vision was a story called Yet Another World about parallel worlds one a dystopia and the other suffering an environmental collapse that come into contact: “Dystopia and postapocalypse, two great tastes that taste great together.”
This becomes a timely reflection on why we are so enamoured of postapocalyptic narratives as “comfort food”. The irony being, what Lethem ultimately has delivered in The Arrest is exactly that – post-apocalyptic comfort food. Including a fairly utopian society, vaguely menacing bad guys on motorcycles, a bit of a deus-ex-machina ending and even a “pastoral meet-cute” sub-plot. The narrative becomes so referential (particularly when Journeyman points out that all of Todbaum’s stories seem to reflect old post-apocalyptic or dystopian tales from Planet of the Apes to Escape from New York) that it becomes hard to know what point Lethem is actually trying to make.
In a year that has seen another proliferation of post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction in print and on the small screen, it may be worth taking a minute to pause and consider why we are drawn to these narratives. Lethem attempts to do this within the framework of a piece of agrarian post-apocalyptic fiction, including the requisite pre-apocalyptic social satire. So that how engaged readers will be will depend not only on their connection to the plot, which is slight, and the characters, some of whom are only just beyond caricature or genre ‘types’, but their interest in the genre as a whole.

I am not adverse to reading any genre of book, and I like to challenge myself .However I found this book to be a step too far for me .I don't mind off the wall, or even bonkers books but this one just didn't resonate with me.I found it very hard to connect to it or the characters. Good to try these things but not for me I am afraid.

Jonathan Lethem veers all over the literary genre landscape, always has, and he forever runs the risk of alienating his rapt fans. His previous novel, The Feral Detective left me rather nonplussed, so I hoped "The Arrest," another switchback turn to the dystopia genre, would restore my faith. Fortunately it does, although the first few chapters are genuinely mystifying. The chapters themselves are short snippets, sometimes only a page long, and the book’s central character, Sandy Duplessis, is a scatty, mild mess, hardly a compelling narrative focus. But Lethem is a superb stylist (albeit in many different styles) and quickly one becomes absorbed in Sandy’s woozy worldview. The storyline is almost daft: after “the Arrest,” a global event that turns off nearly all technology, Sandy is comfortably numb in a rural Maine community that seems to be waiting for apocalypse, when his old movie producer buddy, an outre bullshit personality, arrives in a nuclear-powered digging machine. Throw in Sandy’s sister who once was ambiguously involved with the buddy, and the plot aches with foreboding but also crackles with Sandy’s life journey. Part dystopia, part satire, part examination of love and friendship, The Arrest is an odd fish novel that compels, a memorable peek into a man’s heart and soul. Heartily recommended.

Lethem sets up an interesting world with this one, with shades of the cozy dystopia you get in the second half of a John Wyndham novel, and then sets a good plot in that world (a variation on the classic A Stranger Comes To Town formula). Unfortunately he goes on to make a mess of the execution, thanks to his choice and handling of the main character. Journeyman is a void at the centre of the book. He doesn’t do anything, doesn’t influence anything and has little impact on what happens in the story. He’s just a vessel for describing what other people are doing. The story happens around him, and I’m not sure events would have panned out any differently if he hadn’t been there at all. The vehicle that drives (excuse the pun) the plot is fantastic, some of the imagery is great, especially at the climax, and Lethem can certainly write, but ultimately this is bit of a nothing book.

Jonathan Lethem is very hit or miss with me. I like some of his books but can't get through some of his others - The Arrest is the latter unfortunately. The premise is intriguing but the execution is awful. Lethem's overly-verbose, slow-moving prose means you're stuck reading page after page of exposition while nothing happens in the story. I couldn've have been more bored or disappointed. And I think there was a problem with the formatting of the digital ARC - the first letter of some sentences was missing, which made for an unpleasant read.

Jonathon Lethem has carved himself out a comfortable hole in the literary pop culture crossover sphere. Starting with high concept low weirdness science fiction and then hitting big with Motherless Brooklyn, he has always been pretty very readable but sometimes the big ideas get lost in asides and diversions. The Arrest (which is a distracting name for a post-technology dystopian piece) knows that its field is crowded, and so needs to get some digs or acknowledge the competition (Cormac McCarthy's The Road gets the main kicking here). Having a lead character called (or self referred to - no-one else calls him it) Journeyman is also a bit too cute. Our lead is just that, a Journeyman writer, a script doctor, someone who turns other ideas into the finished item - a quintessential middleman. Here he is, stuck in Maine with few useful skills but living at his sisters biodversity farm when technology stops working, and he narrates some of his past (a quippy Hollywood takedown) with the present - both revolving around his old partner in crime Todbaum. We are years into the dystopia and Todbaum - who also had a fling with Journeyman's sister, turns up in his indestructible nuclear powered car.

Lethem isn't interested in the science of course, "technology stops working" is a standard what if to provide conflict. All technology stopping working except this one self sustainable nuclear powered Supercar (as known) is a wry gag and one which only partially works. In cocking a snook at the Handmaid's Tale and The Road, he also cocks a snook at his own story - which is a little bit of a pity because despite (and sometime because) of the self-deprecating knowingness it has a solid central question at heart. In the kingdom of the technology free, is the man with the Supercar King? There is also a meta-question which Lethem does tease nicely, in a Hollywood and culture industry that seems so obsessed with post-apocalypses, what good has it done us (do we create the dystopias we deserve)? There is definately an amorphous set of rampaging baddies (the Cordon) who are straight out of Mad Max central casting. All of this suggests I didn't enjoy which is not true, though I disliked having the games being played being made quite so obvious in places. There is a slight fear of sincerity here, I wonder if played completely straight if it would have worked better. But equally the wry asides, the moment of nowness (which admittedly feels a little dated already what with everything) might be lost.