... like the novelisation of a comic, a book about the future that is actually an act of nostalgia for when that future and its technology appeared rosy and progressive ... 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. 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.
In his latest novel, The Arrest, Jonathan Lethem explores a world in which technology stops working ... In another book, by another writer, perhaps there would be more in the way of description, causes and mechanisms, the back story that got us to this moment. Exposition begets exposition; down that road lies a more conventional (and most likely longer) dystopian novel. But this is Jonathan Lethem, a master at subverting expectations of form and genre ... He has not written a conventional postapocalyptic cautionary tale. If anything, he seems more interested in unpacking assumptions built into such tales, and why we seem to have an endless appetite for stories that, presumably, should make us feel terrible ... The Arrest may not show Lethem at the height of his powers, but as with so much of his work, it is inventive, entertaining and superbly written.
... thoughtful and laugh-out-loud funny ... 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 ... 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 ... 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 ... 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.
... 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. But it also, somewhat inadvertently, shows the limitations of a science fiction that sees a mass audience as a threat to the future and the present ... The Arrest is a (very self-aware) post apocalyptic novel, set on a near future earth in which most technology has simply stopped working, for reasons that are never explained ... Lethem’s frankly elitist portrayal of Todbaum as an opiate-belching danger to the public is (perhaps paradoxically) thoroughly entertaining and invigorating; he’s almost movie-sized enough to be a supervillain. In contrast to this semi-pulp pleasure, the way the organic farmers handle the threat Todbaum represents is remarkably thoughtful, in every sense. Lethem’s low-key invention makes good on the implicit promise of the novel, and of subcultural SF, to get rid of what the novel calls 'old stories.' In its small way, it is in fact a new narrative—one Hollywood hasn’t yet colonized ... Dispensing with Hollywood’s bloated universality also makes it difficult for Lethem to address real-world large-scale problems. A story about technology fizzling out set on an organic farm seems like an ecological critique waiting to happen. But the novel barely mentions global warming or water pollution or any other environmental issue ... It’s a pleasant and compelling vision. But there’s also something true in those Hollywood monstrosities that insist we’re all trapped in the same universe, and that any salvation has to be big, and come for everyone at once.
Lethem is a beguiling and very smart writer. Told in short, breezy chapters, The Arrest vibrates with sharp, satiric observations and layers upon layers of strange, often funny mashups of popular 1970s and ’80s end-of-the-world books and movies. Ultimately, Lethem’s plot resolves itself, but in ways that do not fully satisfy. This is deliberate. As his fans know, Lethem often plays a deeper game. There are some answered and many unanswered questions in The Arrest—so many that Lethem seems to be suggesting that even at the end of days, the familiar shapes of stories are insufficient, and life itself offers fewer resolutions than we hope for.
'Some say the world will end in fire,' Robert Frost wrote, 'Some say in ice.' But in this era of terrifying dystopias, Jonathan Lethem imagines a kinder, gentler apocalypse ... In Lethem’s new novel, The Arrest, all technology simply grinds to a halt ... but without crime or crisis, The Arrest is the sort of cruelty-free dystopia you might pick up at Whole Foods ... From this eccentric premise, the plot of The Arrest settles quickly into an odd stasis, sustained only by the cerebral wit of Lethem’s voice ... It’s clever but not funny; a satire that never pricks its target. And there’s something frustratingly elliptical about this plot, as though pages may have fallen out on the way to the binder ... In the end, Lethem designs a vast contraption to bring this apocalyptic plot to a mini-climax, but what’s at stake remains oblique. So, if you want a post-apocalyptic story that thwarts the expectations of the dystopian genre, here it is — with a slice of artisanal cheese. This is the way the novel ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.
The question [The Arrest] asks is, 'What if the people who write dystopian fiction had to then go live in a dystopia?' That is the novel’s true premise, and if Lethem does not come up with answers, he puts forward good questions about community, and whether we are living in a simulation, and what it is like to try and rehumanize yourself around the people who ask whether we are living in a simulation, usually as a way to ignore your suffering. Lethem’s novel comments on the kind of person who reaches for this kind of novel as entertainment—the kind of person who would in fact be reading the latest dystopian fiction from Jonathan Lethem.
Lethem has little interest in the technical exposition of what went wrong. His preoccupation is with the social fallout that follows ... Lethem has fun with his fish-out-of-water farce, spinning it in odd directions ... Behind the rebuke about our technological over-reliance, Lethem...[has] a more subtle, and important, message: that American armageddon won’t be the great social leveller. They may be bumbling and inept, but the Clays and Sandys can still expect a pretty cushy apocalypse, the tenured professor holed up with a fund manager and his wine, the screenwriter kept in foie gras in exchange for bicycling duties. They’d call it luck—being in the right place at the right time—but they’ve probably been saying that all their lives.
... has an unserious, gonzo attitude that’s welcome in a well-worn genre. Call it a shaggy-dog apocalypse tale ... a writer gifted at playing with genre forms and riffing on popular culture, he enjoys tweaking dystopian novel conventions: The hustling for resources, the threat of feral outsiders, the unlikely romance amid the chaos, and the obligatory lecture about social inequality and environmental stewardship ... Lethem’s own take is defiantly pulpy, befitting an author who’s written a book-length tribute to the horror-action-comedy cult classic They Live. The novel’s climax is a shambolic mashup of chase sequence and commentary on humanity’s herdlike, primal selves ... Lethem hasn’t invented a new dystopian story, but he’s had a good time dismantling the old one.
Lethem isn’t interested in writing a grandiose good versus evil story ... The Arrest is more interested in asking questions about how an egalitarian community can continue to exist when someone won’t play along. How does equality survive in the face of unchecked ego? Lethem doesn’t make any direct allusions to our (current) commander-in-chief, but it’s hard not to see Trumpian qualities in Todbaum—a man whose desire for attention is all-consuming ... Lethem doesn’t hide his homages. The Arrest is a post-apocalyptic novel that’s self-aware of its subgenre’s tropes. These are characters who’ve watched The Road, after all.
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 ... a timely reflection on why we are so enamoured of post-apocalyptic narratives ... what Lethem has ultimately delivered in The Arrest is...post-apocalyptic comfort food. Including a fairly utopian society, vaguely menacing bad guys on motorcycles, a bit of a deus-ex-machina ending and a romantic sub-plot complete with meet-cute. The narrative becomes so meta and referential...that it becomes hard to know what point Lethem is actually trying to make ... 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. How engaged readers will be by it 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.
If Lethem intended this story to be allegorical like The Feral Detective, he doesn’t quite succeed, but has a lot of fun trying ... Told in very short chapters that make it feel like a page-turner, the story moves along at a decently fast pace, with several funny and entertaining scenes and half-scenes along the way, but the plot fizzles out ... Lethem writes with punnish good humor and real wit as he builds up quite a cordon of tension about what might happen now that Todbaum and his supercar have arrived. But the novel’s tension sizzles away as the peaceful Tinderwickians decide to sacrifice Todbaum.
Todbaum is a quintessential Lethemian protagonist; whip-smart, with an endless vocabulary, he can deploy said verbal acumen with devastating effect ... 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.
... a strange amalgamation of 1970s disaster movie, '80s yuppie comedy, and seemingly whatever else came out of the kitchen sink ... 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.
... a lukewarm tale of an apocalypse set in the very near future ... 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.
