The Arrest by Jonathan Lethem

Published by HarperCollins/Ecco on November 10, 2020

Integral to the story Jonatham Lethem tells in The Arrest is a nuclear-powered supercar called Blue Streak, apparently inspired by nostalgia for a past that imagined the wondrous future of technology. Unlike Blue Streak, most technology in this near future novel has stopped working. Like the power failure in Don DeLillo’s The Silence, the source of this calamity is the subject of speculation rather than explanation. And like DeLillo, Lethem takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to how characters respond to the collapse of the familiar.

The Arrest started with the loss of television, which “contracted a hemorrhagic ailment” that led to the brief return of Family Ties and news of the Vietnam War before it died completely. Email and social media suffered “colony collapse disorder.” Guns worked for almost a year before gunpowder stopped igniting. In the absence of connectivity, the United States was replaced by wherever you happened to be. Technology gave way to solar dehydrators and rooftop rain collectors. Why the Blue Streak (which was assembled from a tunnel boring machine) still works is a mystery to everyone.

Journeyman (a/k/a Alexander Duplessis or Sandy) lives with his sister Madeleine on her farm that operates as a commune. Three towns near the farm occupy a peninsula in Maine. Journeyman’s role in this new world is to bring food and supplies to Jerome Kormetz, a child molester who has been exiled by agreement to a lakeside cabin. He also delivers food to the Cordon, whose members had probably fancied themselves to be a militia before their guns stopped working. The Cordon have formed a perimeter, supposedly to protect the peninsula from attack by New Hampshire. The Cordon are actually more interested in intimidating peninsula residents to assure that the Cordon are fed.

In his pre-collapse life, Journeyman pounded out screenplays for his friend Peter Todbaum, a Hollywood producer who has the ability to pitch but not to create. He made a good living pitching ideas that Journeyman turned into scripts and then pitching the scripts to studios. They were working on a movie about a dystopian future called Yet Another World before the Arrest. Todbaum wanted Journeyman to cobble it together from classic works of post-apocalyptic fiction. As it references those works, the novel takes a well-deserved shot at Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, an example of the caveman version of the genre.

Todbaum visits Journeyman after the Arrest, driving the Blue Streak cross country from Malibu, intuiting that Journeyman would have gone to ground with Madeleine, with whom Todbaum once had an ambiguous relationship, or at least an ambiguous encounter, before Madeleine fell in love with a Somalian refugee named Astur. Todbaum apparently riled up a good many people during his trek, behavior that the commune members regard as unhealthy for the commune. Exactly what Todbaum saw during his journey is unclear. He tells a character named Gorse that America has been completely destroyed, then tells Gorse that their peninsula in Maine is actually part of an experimental biosphere that has been cut off from civilization. The truth is likely to be entirely different, but Gorse will never know.

The plot involves a conflict between Todbaum and the Cordon as well as a conflict between Todbaum and members of the commune who seek refuge from Todbaum and from the Cordon on “an island at the end of land and time.” A mysterious tower on the island becomes a focal point of those conflicts.

Readers might expect novels about the loss of technology to illustrate dependence on technology, but Lethem has traveled beyond allegorical expectations. The Arrest seems to suggest that it’s time to move past the apocalypse and to begin rebuilding on the assumption that it is already upon us. Todbaum discusses and Journeyman frequently ponders “the worth of ritual action”: pillaging, human sacrifice, “the destructive impulse.” Kormetz tells Journeyman he grasps too little of that human need. Perhaps Lethem wants us to understand that we ignore it at our peril.

The Arrest was so different from my expectations that I had to start it three times before I began to wrap my head around it. I kept coming back to it because Lethem wrote it and he’s never disappointed me. When I finally got into it I discovered that, for all its humor, it requires a close reading. Contrary to appearances, this isn’t a light novel. I’m certain it’s a novel I don’t entirely understand. I think Lethem is saying, as does a minor character, that the structure of society doesn’t matter much because “bullshit power games” will erupt in even the most egalitarian communities. The communal peninsula might be a citadel or it might be a prison. That same character tells Journeyman to “tell the truth in what you write,” advice that frightens Journeyman because he doesn’t want to arouse contempt. In the end, perhaps the truth, or a search for truth, is all we have. That, at least, is the message that I took from this puzzling but amusing novel.

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