"Jonathan Lethem has created in The Arrest an allegorical tale full of isolation and rejuvenation fitting for 2020. . . . Lethem is comfortable in his prose, having fun with this novel. . . . In a testament to Lethem's skill as a writer, he hones the novel into an enjoyable vehicle running smoother than that nuclear-powered tunnel digger."
"The Arrest is a novel that defies description in the best possible way, which makes it quintessentially a work of Jonathan Lethem’s at his most sublime. It’s an organic tale of the apocalypse, a Hollywood parable, and a fable of survival and surrender. The prose crackles, the jokes land hard and fast, and the story’s heart is sensationally large. Spectacularly imaginative but grounded in humanity and hope—The Arrest is a perfect novel for this moment and future ones."
Put down your phone and read The Arrest. It feels as though it was written a hundred years from where we are now, in a new human context, but retrospectively inevitable, by someone with a pen trying to imagine the moment that everything became different. Included in the price, Lethem, with wit and suspense, also gives us a Hollywood novel, a love story, and a teenage gizmo novel about a ride across the country in the coolest atomic car ever. If I say anymore I will say too much.”
"Lethem cleverly builds on and subverts the tropes of postapocalyptic dystopias, mixes in a metafictional element, and expertly mines the nature of storytelling and its power to enchant. An inventive and intelligent speculative tale."
As a writer gifted at playing with genre forms and riffing on popular culture, (Lethem) enjoys tweaking dystopian-novel conventions.
"Lethem cleverly builds on and subverts the tropes of postapocalyptic dystopias, mixes in a metafictional element, and expertly mines the nature of storytelling and its power to enchant. An inventive and intelligent speculative tale."
"An impeccably executed, moving, and wildly inventive tale of madness and narrative at the end of the world. Lethem is at the top of his game."
"[An] exuberantly clever and knowing post-apocalyptic dystopia. . . . [Lethem is] a writer of abundant literary gifts who applies them with unapologetic enthusiasm. . . . Extremely strange, twistily plotted, fizzingly written . . . and lingeringly mysterious."
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.
There are all of the expected and welcome pleasures of reading Lethem: his intellect, dialogue and wry humor…as with so much of his work, [The Arrest ] is inventive, entertaining and superbly written.
New York Times Book Review
07/13/2020
Lethem (The Feral Detective ) returns with a lukewarm tale of an apocalypse set in the very near future. Sandy Duplessis worked as a screenwriter in Los Angeles with his friend Peter Todbaum. Then came the Arrest, an unexplained event that caused computers and other technology to stop working and reduced everyone to locavores. In the aftermath, Sandy, who calls himself Journeyman, ends up in rural Maine working as a butcher and delivering food grown by his sister, Maddy. When Todbaum shows up and starts pursuing Mandy, their simple life gets complicated. The locals feel threatened by Todbaum’s presence, and Sandy, who is unnerved by Todbaum’s claim that he predicted the Arrest, wonders if his old friend can be trusted, while Maddy, who begins sleeping with Todbaum, becomes his sole defender. Lethem’s prose is as great as ever (“Journeyman was a middle person, a middleman. Always locatable between things, and therefore special witness in both directions, to extremes remote to one another, an empathic broker between irreconcilable poles—or so he flattered himself”), but despite the fine writing, the plot fails to coalesce into something engaging, the Arrest remains murky, and many scenes feel disjointed. Still, the project crackles and hums with witty dialogue and engaging ideas. While it’s not entirely satisfying, Lethem’s fans won’t mind. (Nov.)
"Jonathan Lethem has created in The Arrest an allegorical tale full of isolation and rejuvenation fitting for 2020. . . . Lethem is comfortable in his prose, having fun with this novel. . . . In a testament to Lethem's skill as a writer, he hones the novel into an enjoyable vehicle running smoother than that nuclear-powered tunnel digger." — Austin Chronicle
“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.” — The Maine Edge
“There are all of the expected and welcome pleasures of reading Lethem: his intellect, dialogue and wry humor…as with so much of his work, [The Arrest ] is inventive, entertaining and superbly written.” — New York Times Book Review
“As a writer gifted at playing with genre forms and riffing on popular culture, (Lethem) enjoys tweaking dystopian-novel conventions.” — USA Today
"An impeccably executed, moving, and wildly inventive tale of madness and narrative at the end of the world. Lethem is at the top of his game." — Emily St. John Mandel, author of The Glass Hotel and Station Eleven
"Lethem cleverly builds on and subverts the tropes of postapocalyptic dystopias, mixes in a metafictional element, and expertly mines the nature of storytelling and its power to enchant. An inventive and intelligent speculative tale." — Booklist
"The Arrest is a novel that defies description in the best possible way, which makes it quintessentially a work of Jonathan Lethem’s at his most sublime. It’s an organic tale of the apocalypse, a Hollywood parable, and a fable of survival and surrender. The prose crackles, the jokes land hard and fast, and the story’s heart is sensationally large. Spectacularly imaginative but grounded in humanity and hope—The Arrest is a perfect novel for this moment and future ones." — Ivy Pochoda
“Put down your phone and read The Arrest. It feels as though it was written a hundred years from where we are now, in a new human context, but retrospectively inevitable, by someone with a pen trying to imagine the moment that everything became different. Included in the price, Lethem, with wit and suspense, also gives us a Hollywood novel, a love story, and a teenage gizmo novel about a ride across the country in the coolest atomic car ever. If I say anymore I will say too much.” — Michael Tolkin
"Rarely has a novel approached the sheer pleasure of The Arrest . This is a dystopian novel in thrall to its own genre, full of knockabout comic book bravado, with regular knowing nods to literary and cinematic history. It is, in short, a blast." — The Observer (London)
"[An] exuberantly clever and knowing post-apocalyptic dystopia. . . . [Lethem is] a writer of abundant literary gifts who applies them with unapologetic enthusiasm. . . . Extremely strange, twistily plotted, fizzingly written . . . and lingeringly mysterious." — Telegraph (UK)
As a writer gifted at playing with genre forms and riffing on popular culture, (Lethem) enjoys tweaking dystopian-novel conventions.
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.
06/01/2020
Protean award winner Lethem here conducts us through the Arrest, a weirdly undefinable time when everything from computers to guns have stopped working. Screenwriter Sandy Duplessis, who has retreated to Maine to help his organic farmer sister, suddenly finds himself playing host to old writing partner Peter Todbaum, who arrives from Hollywood with unclear intentions and a retrofitted tunnel-digger powered by a nuclear reactor. With a 125,000-copy first printing.
Listening to Jonathan Lethem’s imaginative new novel is like listening to someone’s wild but strangely relevant pandemic dream. Here, technology has been “arrested,” along with most of modern civilization. On the coast of Maine, “at the end of land and time,” a small agrarian enclave survives in relative peace and tranquility—though not for long. Narrator Robert Fass maintains a necessary balance between the familiar and the fantastic, portraying a cast of characters who range from bedrock New Englander to West Coast transient. The narrative is brisk, compressing 79 chapters into just seven and a half hours. Lethem’s prose is, as always, fluent, concise, and studded with sharp images and insights that seem surprisingly apt and prescient of the moment. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Listening to Jonathan Lethem’s imaginative new novel is like listening to someone’s wild but strangely relevant pandemic dream. Here, technology has been “arrested,” along with most of modern civilization. On the coast of Maine, “at the end of land and time,” a small agrarian enclave survives in relative peace and tranquility—though not for long. Narrator Robert Fass maintains a necessary balance between the familiar and the fantastic, portraying a cast of characters who range from bedrock New Englander to West Coast transient. The narrative is brisk, compressing 79 chapters into just seven and a half hours. Lethem’s prose is, as always, fluent, concise, and studded with sharp images and insights that seem surprisingly apt and prescient of the moment. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
2020-07-01
Lethem is an odd duck on the best of days, so it’s no wonder his new novel imagines the end of the world through a peculiar lens. After his Big Lebowski –esque version of noir in The Feral Detective (2018), here he takes on the end of the world in a strange amalgamation of 1970s disaster movie, '80s yuppie comedy, and seemingly whatever else came out of the kitchen sink. The lead here is Alexander “Sandy” Duplessis, who, in the wake of a major disaster called the Arrest that wiped out (gasp!) television and then eventually the internet and all contemporary communications, became essentially a modern version of David Brin’s The Postman (1985), here called Journeyman. Our guy divides his time between making deliveries and studying under the local butcher. The Journeyman got stuck in rural New England when everything went to hell, visiting his sister Maddy’s farm in what seems to have become a feudal community in Maine. Things go sideways when Sandy’s old Yale roommate and Hollywood writing partner Peter Todbaum turns up in a nuclear “supercar” called The Blue Streak—modeled on the vehicle out of the old '70s post-apocalyptic movie Damnation Alley —that can apparently tunnel underground and operate underwater, among other things. The backstory is that the two menwere working on a project in Hollywood (“Todbaum the bullshitter, Journeyman the hands on the keyboard”). But then something uncomfortable happened between Todbaum and Journeyman’s sister. Lethem is certainly capable of having gone full-on Cormac McCarthy here, but instead this is pretty much a sly play on post-apocalyptic fantasies, with the operative word being play. Superminimalist writing, short chapters, interstitial images from the Journeyman’s scrapbook, and Lethem’s unusual perspective make for odd bedfellows, but it’s a decent distraction from the real world right now.
A meditation on a dystopian future that maintains a careful balance between social satire and purposeful provocation.
