The Arrest

The Arrest isn't post-apocalypse. It isn't a dystopia. It isn't a utopia. It's just what happens when much of what we take for granted - cars, guns, computers, and airplanes, for starters - stops working... Before the Arrest, Sandy Duplessis had a reasonably good life as a screenwriter in L.A. An old college friend and writing partner, the charismatic and malicious Peter Todbaum, had become one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. That didn't hurt. Now, post-Arrest, nothing is what it was. Sandy, who calls himself Journeyman, has landed in rural Maine. There he assists the butcher and delivers the food grown by his sister, Maddy, at her organic farm. But then Todbaum shows up in an extraordinary vehicle: a retrofitted tunnel-digger powered by a nuclear reactor. Todbaum has spent the Arrest smashing his way across a fragmented and phantasmagorical United States, trailing enmities all the way. Plopping back into the siblings' life with his usual odious panache, his motives are entirely unclear. Can it be that Todbaum wants to produce one more extravaganza? Whatever he's up to, it may fall to Journeyman to stop him. Written with unrepentant joy and shot through with just the right amount of contemporary dread, The Arrest is speculative fiction at its absolute finest.

About the Author :
Jonathan Lethem is the New York Times bestselling author of ten novels, including The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. He currently teaches creative writing at Pomona College in California.

Review :
The thing about the best Lethem novels - and I'm thinking back to early in his career, to Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude - is that they were such fun. I've read everything he's written since and rarely has a novel approached the sheer pleasure of The Arrest... It is, in short, a blast. Exuberantly clever... extremely strange, twistily plotted, fizzingly written, not a little absurd and lingeringly mysterious. Lethem's pithy chapters - some poetic, some sharp, others both - bring this eerily timely tale to a grim, if wry, conclusion. Inventive, entertaining and superbly written A certain goofy charm... Jonathan Lethem's apocalypse is a whimsical one. 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. A pleasingly idiosyncratic take on things falling apart If part of the point of The Arrest is that we love our apocalypses neatly packaged, then Lethem deserves credit for refusing to play along: his inimitable imagination never stops delivering curveballs. Jonathan Lethem's latest novel, "The Arrest," is a work of literary fiction that associates itself with the science fiction subculture by launching a carefully planned assault on the science fiction pop-culture juggernaut. In doing so, the book provides a quietly lyrical alternative to the uberviolence and cliché blustering of Hollywood plots. 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. It's a wonderful read, the writing gracefully gonzo, the emotional beats often unexpected yet quite right. As a writer gifted at playing with genre forms and riffing on popular culture, (Lethem) enjoys tweaking dystopian-novel conventions. Sentence by sentence, Lethem is sheer visual delight. The Arrest is a very wry, very smart novel - every wink and twist is pre-empted. For all the genre shenanigans it has a proper purpose.