The Arrest

A Novel

By: Jonathan Lethem

Narrated by: Robert Fass

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.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

An Odd but Enjoyable Story

I liked this book, after a slow start. It was a strange twist on the post-apocalyptic genre, with unusual and likeable characters, a truly unpleasant antagonist, and an unexpected plot.

Metaphors are alive and hold the page

This book is both about a future world and, as all good sci-fi, about where we are, have been, where we are going. The we here seems to be Americans, suffering a kind of inversion of the frontier as a futurist design with nostalgic glimmer heads back east. Ugh so good.

Wonderful

A hilarious, Pynchon-esque, dystopian novel. Not for everyone, but an amazing and allegorical take for those interested.

How to describe a Lethem novel?

Another Lethem novel to wrap around your brain. He doesn’t hurry, he doesn’t waste words either. An “End of the World” with all the characters that are sure to be there. Those you love and those you hate. A book to hear again after it has had time to percolate and settle in your brain.

intriguing post apocalyptic

in a world where technology ceases to exist, a lost remain of the previous world comes to haunt a local community. especially resounding where listening to this in times of lockdown