Lethem’s ‘The Arrest’ puts a charge into dystopian novels
The author twists the genre, taking satirical aim at apocalyptic fiction. Review,
Even a casual reader is probably worn down with dystopia fatigue these days: young adult and literary-fiction shelves are now so stuffed with tales of humanity’s imminent doom that it can feel like all the other book ideas are endangered species. Jonathan Lethem’s 12th novel, “The Arrest” (Ecco, 320 pp., ★★★☆), likely won’t convert the exhausted, but it has an unserious, gonzo attitude that’s welcome in a well-worn genre. Call it a shaggy-dog apocalypse tale.
Set in the near future, the novel centers on Sandy, a Hollywood script doctor who has moved to an agrarian compound in Maine following a technological cratering called the Arrest. Amid “the collapse and partition and relocalization of everything,” he lives near his sister, Maddy, and makes a living doing odd jobs and running errands, earning the nickname Journeyman.
For a few chapters, Lethem lets us romanticize this setup. The Arrest has cleared the way for an earthy, cooperative community undistracted by screens as if humanity has found its true destiny in a verdant, hobbit-y shire. Except of course not: Soon a massive nuclearpowered “supercar” comes barreling into town. At the wheel is Peter, Journeyman’s former college roommate and screenwriting partner, who later became a studio mogul.
“Had Todbaum, master producer, come here to make some spectacle?” Journeyman wonders “Was he location scouting?”
Peter’s intentions are weirder than that. He seems persuaded that the Arrest is the real-world manifestation of a screenplay about dystopias and dual realities that he once worked on with Journeyman. Moreover, reassembling civilization requires Maddy, with whom Peter had a brief entanglement. “Me and Maddy, we’re jump-starting history, the whole tentpole franchise,” Peter insists. “Dystopia and postapocalypse, two great tastes that taste great together.”
Here it helps to know that Lethem has a tattoo on his arm paying tribute to Philip K. Dick, the science fiction author who specialized in smashing out-there alternate realities into our ho-hum everyday ones. Lethem name-checks one of Dick’s postapocalyptic novels, 1965’s “Dr. Bloodmoney,” as part of a riff on our obsession with the genre. Why have Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood and more been so fixated on imagining humanity in tatters? Why is our decline, as Peter says, “the old song we all long to hear?”
Lethem has no clear answer to the question, and “The Arrest” sings that song, too. But as 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 booklength 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. At one point, Journeyman muses that after the Arrest “stories ... might be among the kind of machines that no longer worked.” Lethem hasn’t invented a new dystopian story, but he’s had a good time dismantling the old one.