The arrest : a novel

Title:

Author:

Lethem, Jonathan, author.

Personal Author:

Lethem, Jonathan, author.

ISBN:

9780062938787

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

307 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Abstract:

"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."--Publisher.

Post-Arrest America: cars, guns, computers, airplanes, and so much more have stopped working. In Maine former screenwriter Sandy Duplessis, who calls himself Journeyman, assists the butcher and delivers the food grown by his sister, Maddy, at her organic farm. Charismatic and malicious, Peter Todbaum had been one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. When Todbaum shows up in Maine in a retrofitted tunnel-digger powered by a nuclear reactor after smashing his way across a fragmented United States, his motives are entirely unclear. -- adapted from jacket

Subject Term:

Organic farmers -- Fiction.

Motion picture authorship -- Fiction.

Brothers and sisters -- Fiction.

Screenwriters -- Fiction.

Nuclear propulsion -- Fiction.

Speculative fiction, American.

Geographic Term:

Maine -- Fiction.

Genre:

Science fiction.

Dystopian fiction.

Summary:

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Shelf Number	Status
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Summary

From the award-winning author of The Feral Detective and Motherless Brooklyn comes an utterly original post-collapse yarn about two siblings, the man that came between them, and a nuclear-powered super car.

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--quits 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.

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

After the apocalypse, two former Hollywood pals find themselves at odds with one another. 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 men were 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.