Author bends dystopian genre

The Arrest Jonathan Lethem Atlantic

“If Journeyman was an expert in one thing, it was post-apocalyptic and dystopian stories,” Jonathan Lethem writes of the protagonist of this exuberantly clever and knowing post-apocalyptic dystopia.

Lethem himself is no slouch in that department, either. He's a writer of abundant literary gifts who applies them to remixing and colliding pulp genres. But when Lethem bends a genre, it stays bent.

This one is bendy in all the right ways: a post-apocalyptic story whose characters are fretfully aware of the clichés of the genre. Journeyman himself is a storyteller of sorts, after all. He knows catastrophe fiction as a script doctor for schlockey Hollywood movies.

Then came the Arrest of the title. Civilization went phut. At first, there was accelerating ecological mayhem, which everyone ignored. But then TV fizzled and died; then screens (“the Gmail, the texts and swipes and Facetimes, the tweets and likes, these suffered colony collapse disorder”); then gasoline (“inched from the pump nozzles like molten flourless cake”); then guns “died too, souring like milk.”

Since Journeyman was visiting his sister Maddy at her hippie-ish eco-commune in an old New England lobster town when the Arrest happened, there he now is — working as a messenger boy, ferrying parcels of sausages and bread around the place.

This communitarian idyll is surrounded — whether protected or imprisoned is ambiguous — by the Cordon, a crew of toughs who ride motorbikes powered by human excrement. The Good Life in zone 1, you could say, and Mad Max in zone 2.

Through the Cordon comes a giant “supercar” that disrupts the equilibrium of Journeyman's comfortable post-apocalyptic dystopia. The car is a glorious piece of Jules Verne science fiction kitsch that turns out to be an impregnable nuclear-powered tunnelling machine.

The Arrest is a dystopian story looped through with anxious jokes about how dystopian stories work.