Review: The Arrest
The Arrest by Jonathan Lethem
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Jonathan Lethem's The Arrest is an odd take on a muted post-apocalyptic future after The Arrest, an extended event during which all tech, from TV to the internet to cell phones, stop working. The protagonist, Alexander "Sandy" Dupless is left stranded (vehicles using conventional fuel don't work either) up in New England near his sister, Maddy Duplessis, and her organic farm commune (which is a generous term for it, given how feudal it all seems) in Maine. At one time, before The Arrest, Sandy and his former roommate from Yale, Peter Todbaum, we're living out in Hollywood, trying to write the greatest post-apocalyptic dystopian screenplay ever. A brief encounter between Todbaum and Maddy seems to have set off a series of changes and ultimately Sandy, who was deeply unsettled by his sister's involvement with Todbaum, has landed in Maine, working as a journeyman (think more like a UPS delivery guy, delivering food, news, and more) in their small community which tries to thrive despite the titular Arrest. And it was all going along swimmingly, for the most part, until Todbaum shows up in a vehicle called The Blue Streak (think a nuclear-powered tank) asking for Sandy and Maddy and setting off a fatal chain of events.
There are elements of this story, including its gentle apocalypse that has ended modern life as we know it, that offer great bones for a story. The characters here left me cold sadly, and I honestly struggled to finish the novel, finally buying the audiobook to do so. Lethem's prose is always sharp-edged and crisp, but sometimes I just have difficulty feeling engaged with his characters. I didn't really like anyone in the novel other than the elusive secondary character Drenka. That lack of caring made it hard for me to care about what would happen to the principal characters and the novel's outcome.
The audiobook is nicely narrated by Robert Fass.
I received a digital review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Jonathan Lethem's The Arrest is an odd take on a muted post-apocalyptic future after The Arrest, an extended event during which all tech, from TV to the internet to cell phones, stop working. The protagonist, Alexander "Sandy" Dupless is left stranded (vehicles using conventional fuel don't work either) up in New England near his sister, Maddy Duplessis, and her organic farm commune (which is a generous term for it, given how feudal it all seems) in Maine. At one time, before The Arrest, Sandy and his former roommate from Yale, Peter Todbaum, we're living out in Hollywood, trying to write the greatest post-apocalyptic dystopian screenplay ever. A brief encounter between Todbaum and Maddy seems to have set off a series of changes and ultimately Sandy, who was deeply unsettled by his sister's involvement with Todbaum, has landed in Maine, working as a journeyman (think more like a UPS delivery guy, delivering food, news, and more) in their small community which tries to thrive despite the titular Arrest. And it was all going along swimmingly, for the most part, until Todbaum shows up in a vehicle called The Blue Streak (think a nuclear-powered tank) asking for Sandy and Maddy and setting off a fatal chain of events.
There are elements of this story, including its gentle apocalypse that has ended modern life as we know it, that offer great bones for a story. The characters here left me cold sadly, and I honestly struggled to finish the novel, finally buying the audiobook to do so. Lethem's prose is always sharp-edged and crisp, but sometimes I just have difficulty feeling engaged with his characters. I didn't really like anyone in the novel other than the elusive secondary character Drenka. That lack of caring made it hard for me to care about what would happen to the principal characters and the novel's outcome.
The audiobook is nicely narrated by Robert Fass.
I received a digital review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
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