The Arrest audiobook

After Lethem's recent novel The Feral Detective, I didn't know what to expect. This is an unconventional post-apocalyptic novel. Contrary to the blurb, I would not call it dystopian. Apart from the metafictional antics of its screenwriter main character, it comes alive with humorous anachronisms, some subtle social commentary, stock characters, witty repartee, and most of all, luscious descriptions of a monolithic "supercar" steampunk vehicle, which actually takes up most of the "screen time" of this cinematic book. Notably it has a desolate, and (for me) surprising ending. I would call the outlook of most of the characters bleak, but Lethem imbued his parable with enough playful language to enthuse me throughout. Definitely not a complex work like his three big novels, this falls more in line with his shorter, quirkier novels - Girl in Landscape more than As She Climbed Across the Table. He seems like a multi-layered novelist, and I am curious what he has in store for us next time. His retro-futurism works better here than elsewhere, though I think I liked Gambler's Anatomy more. The quality of the narration was as unpredictable as the world building. Most of the cataclysmic event preceding the novel's events are merely hinted at, instead of explicated.I thought the book could have gone on longer, could have turned into an interesting road novel aboard a pynchonian retro-fitted future craft, but the characters mostly sat around and philosophized. A missed opportunity, since this was the perfect set up for a truly epic novel. Why doesn't Lethem take his time, really pull out the stops and give us a work that can rival Pynchon, Philip K. Dick and other big names? Mostly, he imitates the big boys. And he does it well. Still, he has the ability and popularity to write a monolithic masterpiece - I'm still waiting, Lethem.

"Dystopia and postapocalypse, two great tastes that taste great together."The world as we know it ends. For no particular reason, or maybe all of them, everything just stops. In Jonathan Lethem's The Arrest, the why of it is hardly the point. The point is that our world shrinks. Way, way down, to a tiny little sliver of its former glory. Yet, still, those parts of your life you'd rather forget can follow you anywhere. Sometimes, literally. Like tracking you down in a nuclear powered, tunnel boring supercar from coast to coast.The Arrest has the feel of a dream. A protagonist, Journeyman, AKA Sandy, AKA Alexander Duplessis, who, timid and introverted, seems perpetually one step behind, out of the loop, not quite in control of his own destiny. Journeyman has a problem in the form of his irksome, manipulative, slightly demented and megolomaniac yet charismatic frenemy, Peter Todbaum. It's a weird relationship, this. Like a shark and remora, only in reverse. Peter's presence threatens to turn his nice, sleepy post-apocalyptic paradise into a real you-know-what show."Wonder, wonder, such things to wonder over. How had it all come to exactly this? When would Journeyman figure it out, if not now? Here in the oasis of time at the end of the world? Yet since Todbaum’s arrival, time had perhaps restarted. Todbaum was his own ticking clock; he carried deadlines, crises. Worse than a clock. A ticking bomb."Lethem's prose is pithy, evocative and genuine, fantastically capturing the nuances of Journeymen's fraught, unbalanced relationships with his friend and his sister. A real pleasure. Full of a foreboding sense of a less than sublime past about to catch up with the here and now, a balance and serenity about to be shattered. Waiting for true intentions to be revealed and the other shoe to drop. Will there be war? A personal reckoning? Maybe some of both.* I received an advanced review copy of The Arrest in exchange for a fair and honest review.

It's the summer of 2020, I don't need to read a novel about a dystopian world with an uncertain future, I can turn on CNN, or watch a city council meeting about masks. I read this book anyway, because Jonathan Lethem's name is on it (Well, he wrote it. If you wrote his name on 50 Shades of Grey, I probably wouldn't read it.) (No offense 50 Shades fans.) and I was not disappointed.Something happened to turn off all electrical equipment and break almost all appliances. We don't know what the event was. We just know that Sandy Duplessis used to be a script doctor, and now he's a butcher's assistant/delivery person living in his sister's commune-like town in rural Maine. We go back and forth from his current arrested circumstances to his life in Hollywood working for Peter Todbaum. Well, they started as colleagues, then Peter made it huge and Sandy just worked for him. Suddenly in the present Todbaum shows up in town with a nuclear powered impossible super car and things go... well. They go somewhere.Lethem's writing style is always so easy to jump in and savor the words. The characters are bright and fun to investigate. He has an ability to create a full picture of a character with very few words, and that sticks with you each time the character returns. I liked the meta analysis of dystopian movie/literature where Todbaum says authors who create these worlds want to live there. And, there's something to be said for that I think Lethem did create a world people would want to live in, but he made it clear it wasn't a happy one in spite of some really dank buds - “We lost people. Every one of us lost someone we loved.” The structure of the story itself was interesting. Jumping from after The Arrest to before filled some holes in information, while leaving plenty open to speculate. But, even of the speculation, like what happened to cause the Arrest? The book doesn't spend a lot of time caring about that. And, therefore, neither did I. Something happened. It doesn't matter what. Is what the characters seemed to think, as well as this reader.Lethem's style, in this novel at least, made for a quick read. The chapters were short, and I was always eager to read the next one to see what happened next. I enjoyed the world and characters he created. Some of them stuck with me well after I stopped reading the book. Thanks to Netgalley for supplying a copy of this book. It didn't affect my review.

Dystopian novel about the world after “The Arrest” of progress. One of his recent books that I actually enjoyed quite a bit. Before this effort my feeling was that Lethem had stumbled upon a bit of a dry spell and I was doubting his ability to return to prominence.

I’m a Lemthemite,I resisted it long as I could. But I’ve accepted that I’m just going to read each new book he puts out. He makes it easy, they’re quick reads and enjoyable. Has Lethem become writer of entertainment more than substance? No. But what I’d say of the last three books is that they’re literary pulp. If you accept that going in you’re going to be fine. The clauses are still incredible, it’s details are jewel-like, but these last three books ain’t going to change your like. And although catharsis is cool, I find it freeing, to enjoy an object of art for form alone. One of the vains-of-theme in what’s considered “late Lethem” are the hippies. Leth is obsessed with them, nothing consumes his imagination more than the flower children. In Gamblers Anatomy the main character’s mother was a digger. (one of those important characters that aren’t in the book) then in Feral Detective you go live with “late Diggers” in the Bunny community. With Arrest it’s (spoiler) post-apocalyptic. Is it hippie for being so? Ish. Love aint free but I don’t cost much. Why? Lethem is a culture cat. He writes essays about music and film, his references are high brow, mid brow, and some upper-eyelash. The end of the world is bad business for him. And yet, perhaps that’s what intrigued him, humility though disaster. It’s like the Von Kleist story about the volcano, after the devastation everyone is kind for like, an afternoon. Lethem would be his own Journeyman and his surgeons move about the world even as you and I.

Video reviewLethem, like his bereaved farmers and shit-bikers, goes back to the basics - and to his genre origins.The novel's fantastic but the pictures smell of author gone power-crazy. Next thing he'll be giving us colored fonts, or even, shudder, left-aligned courier.

Ersilia F. - per RFS.L’Arresto è la conseguenza di quello che succede quando tutto ciò che abbiamo sempre creduto scontato come le macchine, gli aerei, i cellulari, la tv, le armi, insomma la tecnologia, smette di funzionare così all’improvviso.Immaginate un mondo dove le nostre abitudini – anche quelle più semplici, come accendere la tv – svaniscono. Non siamo più connessi tra di noi, non sappiamo cosa succede nel resto del pianeta, anzi, non sappiamo addirittura cosa succede nella città più vicina a noi. Il globo si è fermato e possiamo dividerlo in un prima e dopo l’arresto, in quello che eravamo e in ciò che siamo diventati.Questa è la nuova esistenza che ci viene raccontata attraverso la vita di Alexander Duplessis, detto Garzone: prima dell’accaduto faceva lo sceneggiatore a Los Angeles e, quando è successo il tutto, è rimasto bloccato nel Maine alla fattoria biologica della sorella Maddy.La sua vita trascorre tranquilla, almeno fino all’arrivo di un vecchio amico del passato, Peter Todbaum, produttore e datore di lavoro di Garzone, che suscita grande clamore nella comunità perché si fa trovare al volante di un’imponente macchina in grado di percorrere miglia e miglia, in un mondo dove il combustibile è sparito dalla Terra.Da quel momento le cose si rivoluzioneranno per tutti.La quotidianità dell’intera comunità verrà stravolta e, soprattutto, dovranno affrontare le conseguenze delle cattive decisioni di quelli che abitano oltre il confine e che, portando scompiglio, sono decisi a impadronirsi della macchina.Con uno stile impeccabile, ricco di riferimenti al cinema e alla letteratura, Lethem ci regala una favola che parla molto di noi e di come reagiamo a ciò che non riusciamo a comprendere, limitandoci ad accettare quello che la vita ci mette davanti.In un alternarsi di passato e presente, ci troviamo di fronte a una storia in cui il punto principale è proprio il “raccontare storie”, tramandare il passato nel presente per un futuro diverso, ma non per forza migliore.Un romanzo distopico sull’esistenza e su come la viviamo, che mi ha lasciato un po’ perplessa sul finale, un tantino – a mio parere – poco chiaro, incerto, come se aleggiasse un mistero che rimarrà tale.

"You people are supposed to, you know, write it to keep it from happening, right? Cautionary tales?" Will Jonathan Lethem take his own character's hint? Lethem does his post apocalyptic dystopian novel his way, which reflects our era: seemingly distracted, possibly without a destination, He cleverly short circuits our "seen it" defenses, successfully creating a world we can believe in because it's pedestrian enough that we think we got past bursting it's bubble, rendered it incapable of surprise. But bubbling up from the somewhat banal characters are hints of, "the destructive impulse." The Arrest begins by setting the scene in the near future after the cessation of all electronic technology. "The lesson is we're all dumb destructive monkeys in the dark." These lines reverberate in my head when I reflect on the mob sack of the American Capitol on January 6, 2021. Lethem packs power in making the characters such every-man types. Can they rise, can good or even civilization itself prevail over fear and violence? This question is more interesting when the characters are less so. As Hannah Arendt put it, “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” "Some days Journeyman thought the world had been crazy and tried to go sane: that was the Arrest."Journeyman, our protagonist is a guy who goes along to get along. Journeyman reflects, "Choose your battles, he thought. Had he ever chosen even one?"

3 stelle e 2/3 arrotondate. Dalla sinossi poteva sembrare un noir pynchoniano in stile Inherent Vice, invece The Arrest è un romanzo post-apocalittico fantascientifico, un po’ al crocevia tra Ballard, Dick e certa narrativa sci-fi old school degli anni ’60 se vogliamo. Curioso che lo si possa leggere come una sorta di seguito di “The Silence” di Don DeLillo: per certi versi DeLillo catturo l’attimo in cui avviene quell’Arresto che è poi la colonna vertebrale del libro di Lethem. Ma nonostante la sua facciata post-apocalittica e fantascientifica, “The Arrest” è un romanzo che riesce a smarcarsi molto bene dalle definizioni e restrizioni di genere. È un romanzo soprattutto fatto di personaggi. Personaggi semplici e forse proprio per questo efficaci: il reietto, la bibliotecaria autoreclusa in biblioteca, i guerrieri in stile Mad Max, Maddy, la survivalista hard-core che viveva già il mondo post-apocalittico nel passato come una distopia presente, e Alexander Duplessis, l’antieroe lethemiano, sooprannominato Journeyman, un uomo senza qualità, verrebbe da dire, sopravvissuto quasi per caso e che forse grazie alla sua assenza di tratti forti finisce per essere un collante del novo mondo, finché non arriva Todbaum, a bordo di una strana macchina futuristica. Todbaum è un vecchio amico di Journeyman, e questo innesca una serie di flashback dove apprendiamo che i due erano scrittori in tandem e il romanzo diventa una meta-narrativa sui generis, nella quale ci si chiede a cosa servano distopie, apocalissi e altre forme del romanzo dell’antropocene, e si mostra che la costruzione di un mondo reale è sempre una questione di scrittura, di organizzare e pianificare ciò che si ha in mano. C’è poca azione (cosa che per qualcuno può essere un limite) e qualche vezzo di troppo con inutili immagini inserite qua e là e che potevano benissimo essere evitate. Comunque per me il miglior Lethem da “Dissident Garden.”

I greatly enjoyed this new novel by Jonathan Lethem. Lethem manages to write a fast funny book about a technological apocalypse. The Arrest arbitrarily and without explanation causes all modern forms of technology to cease to function. Books of this type are proliferating. Something similar happens in Rumann Alamo’s novel Leave the World Behind and Don DeLillo’s new book covers the same theme. Years ago David Mitchell wrote about this in Bone Clockers. As bas as COVID is the idea that we might blow the planet’s fuse is pretty scary and I hope to have checked out before this occurs.Given the subject matter I paused before reaching for this book but I enjoyed Lethem’s writing. This is the ninth book by him I have read. Right now I would say it is his most entertaining. The book is filled with quirky characters but dominating the story is Journeyman a quasi successful screenwriter who is fortunately in Maine visiting his farmer sister in Maine when the Arrest occurs.Journeyman does a variety of McJobs around the quasi communal group he lives with in Maine. Things change drastically when an old friend/nemesis Todbaum invades the rustic oasis in a nuclear powered Supercar. Todbaum is seeking to make a tent pole movie about this dystopian disaster with the assistance of Journeyman and his sister.The crazed banter between Todbaum and Journeyman is completely entertaining.Stop reading my review and read the Arrest

You might call the genre that The Arrest fits into "semi-apocalyptic" or "anti-apocalyptic", perhaps "post-postapocalyptic"? Lethem playfully reinvents the tropes of Hollywood blockbusters (70s disaster movies, 80s action-comedy) and apocaliterature into something hilarious yet thoughtful, satirical yet warm-hearted. A Vonnegutian tragicomedy about what happens when technology fails us.

A very pleasant surprise. Jonathan Lethem uses dystopian fiction as a device to deliver a meta-narrative on the art of storytelling itself. The beauty of it is that the story taken at face value works just as well as it does as allegory.