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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The System by Ryan Gattis

Published by Farrar, Straus and Girou/MCD on December 8, 2020

The System is a fascinating novel about the criminal justice system as seen from the perspectives of multiple characters. It is one of the most perceptive takes on crime and criminal justice I’ve encountered in some time.

There are actually two systems at work in the novel. Running parallel to the government’s system of law and order is one that imposes a different sort of order. It determines how prisoners run prisons and how gangs run streets.

Key characters experience events that change them in ways that are beneficial or unsettling or both. Some of the characters have epiphanies that the reader hopes will guide the rest of their lives. Those characters give the novel its heart. To their misfortune, other characters fail to take advantage of opportunities to change. Those characters contribute to the novel’s sense of realism.

The story begins with Angela Alvarez breaking up with her boyfriend, Jacob Safulu, a/k/a Dreamer. Angela is beautiful and smart. She lives in a house she inherited from her aunt in a low-income neighborhood. She lives with Dreamer and her cousin, Omar Tavira, a/k/a Wizard. She works as a barista and takes nursing classes because she wants to make a better life for herself. Dreamer and Wizard are good friends but Dreamer isn’t part of Wizard’s gang life. Dreamer doesn’t know what he wants to be. Angela thinks he’s drifting in order to avoid responsibility. That’s not what she wants in a boyfriend.

As Angela is delivering the bad news to Dreamer, Wizard is shooting a woman named Scrappy. The hit has been ordered by Wizard’s gang leader to send a message about Scrappy’s failure to respect territorial boundaries. An addict named Augie Clark was trying to score from Scrappy shortly before the shooting. He sees it go down and saves her life after the shooter flees. He also steals all the heroin she’s hidden on her person and the gun that the shooter dropped at the scene.

Augie’s parole agent, Phillip Petrillo, finds the drugs and the gun during a search of Augie’s room. Petrillo is also Wizard’s parole agent. When Augie admits that he stole the gun after watching Wizard shoot Scrappy, Petrillo convinces him to say that Wizard’s accomplice, who Augie didn’t recognize, was Dreamer, who Augie doesn’t know.

Petrillo wants to set up Dreamer because he knows Dreamer is dating Angela and, having met Angela a few times during home visits with Wizard, he knows Angela is hot. To get Dreamer out of the way, Petrillo searches Angela’s house and plants the gun in the room where Dreamer sleeps. Petrillo has used his position to further inappropriate relationships with many other young women but he sees Angela as his biggest conquest.

The plot moves forward through the arrest and trial of Wizard and Dreamer. Chapters narrate the story from each of their perspectives as well as those of Angela, a defense lawyer, a prosecutor, and a couple of cops. I love the variety of distinct voices in which the story is told. Each voice is articulate in its own way, reminding the reader that intelligence and formal education are two different things.

Angela is a sympathetic character. Through Petrillo, she gets a taste of what opportunities the world outside her neighborhood might hold. When she realizes what a cad Petrillo is, she struggles with the fact that she felt attracted to him and begins to realize that the attraction was not to Petrillo but to what he might represent.

Dreamer also changes, moving in different directions as the novel unfolds. His adaptation to prison life might in some ways be unhealthy, despite the imperative to do what it takes to survive. At the same time, he begins to realize that his loyalty to Wizard hasn’t been repaid and that the code of the street isn’t as important as the ideas he encounters after diving into the prison library. The fact that Dreamer and Angela both take advantage of the opportunity to confront life in a more positive way suggests that all of us might be able to do the same.

The novel encourages the reader to empathize with the kind of people who are often condemned by society. It similarly encourages the reader to understand that people who perform jobs that purportedly benefit society are sometimes interested only in benefiting themselves. Ultimately, the novel reminds us that life is more complex than people with limited experience imagine it to be.

The plot might be faulted for delivering such a satisfying ending. Trial scenes are compelling but not always accurate in detailing how the judicial system works. Those are insignificant quibbles about a story that kept me spellbound.

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Indigo by Loren D. Estleman

Published by Forge Books on July 28, 2020

I don’t have enough fingers and toes to count all the books Loren D. Estleman has written. Indigo is the sixth novel in his Valentino, Film Detective series. I’ve dipped into and enjoyed his Amos Walker mysteries but this was my first exposure to Valentino.

Valentino tracks down lost motion pictures for the Film and Television Archive at UCLA. He’s also rehabilitating an old theater called The Oracle and lives in an apartment in the projection booth. His girlfriend, Harriet Johansen, is a forensic pathologist but she doesn’t have much of a role in this novel.

Among Valentino’s many friends is Ignacio Bozal, who made some money somewhere, then bought and restored a resort in Acapulco that made even more money before he showed up in Hollywood and began making generous contributions to the Film and Television Archive. Bozal gets Valentino interested in a Hollywood actor named Van Oliver who made one movie, a noir called Bleak Street. Insiders who saw Oliver work thought the realism he brought to the part was revolutionary. Bozal suggests that Oliver had a shady past that gave him insight into the behavior of gangsters. Oliver disappeared in 1957 and was widely presumed to have been murdered.

Bozal got his hands on the only surviving copy of Bleak Street. He gives it to Valentino, whose boss thinks the premiere will get huge press if Valentino can solve the mystery of Van Oliver’s disappearance. As the plot unfolds, Valentino discovers that multiple people for multiple reasons want Bleak Street to remain out of the public eye.

Indigo is a pleasant novel written in Estleman’s erudite prose style. Estleman’s investigation introduces the reader to a variety of credible characters, including gangsters, cops, and a Hollywood retiree who might have something of value to contribute if he has a lucid moment. The story misdirects, as a classic mystery should. The solution to the mystery caught me off guard, as a classic mystery should.

Indigo is, in short, the kind of book that should appeal to fans of classic mysteries. It isn’t a thriller — don’t expect shootouts or car chases — but it does create tension at key moments. Valentino is a bright, unassuming fellow whose knowledge of film trivia seems to be unparalleled. That makes Indigo a good choice for fans of film noir as well as fans of mysteries.

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The Mountains Wild by Sarah Stewart Taylor

Published by Minotaur Books on June 23, 2020

Lucid prose makes it easy to follow the complex plot that carries a murder mystery across two continents and 23 years. The story jumps between two time periods as the protagonist tries to understand the circumstances that led to Erin Flaherty’s disappearance and presumed death.

Erin was raised in Long Island but she always had a strong interest in her family’s Irish history, in part because her father, Danny Flaherty, ran the kind of Irish bar that quietly passed the hat to support the IRA. She decides to visit Ireland in 1993, ostensibly to enjoy her youth. Her cousin Maggie D’Arcy eventually realizes that she had another motive.

Erin finds a place to stay in Dublin, where she is visited by some backpacking friends, including Brian Lombardi, who will marry Maggie and have a daughter with her before they divorce. Maggie bears a striking resemblance to Erin. They grew up as best friends.

Not long after the disappearance, Maggie goes to Dublin to look for Erin. Retracing Erin’s journeys, Maggie discovers that Erin had visited the Wicklow Mountains and made a return visit shortly before she disappeared. Other evidence suggests that Erin traveled to Dublin after her second visit to the mountains, but Maggie is poking around mountain paths when she finds Erin’s beloved necklace, making Maggie fear foul play. A German girl went missing in the area at about the same time, creating the fear of a serial killer. Unfortunately, neither Maggie nor the police can find an explanation for Erin’s disappearance.

In 2016, a Galway girl named Niamh Horrigan disappears in the mountains, potentially the latest victim of the serial killer. As the police search for her, they find human remains and a scarf that may have belonged to Erin. Danny doesn’t have the strength to go to Ireland himself so he asks Maggie to meet with the Irish police. By this point, Maggie has been a police officer for 20 years. She meets with Roly Byrne, the Irish cop who befriended her in 1993. After skillfully sidestepping Irish cops who want to freeze her out of the case, Maggie is given a consulting role that includes access to evidence concerning similar murders over the course of almost three decades. The key suspect seems to be Naill Deasey, but he wasn’t living in the mountains when all the murders were committed.

While the story follows a familiar crime thriller formula — girl goes missing, the protagonist must find her before her abductor causes her death — Sarah Stewart Taylor invigorates the story with the kind of detail that makes the formula seem fresh. Some clues point to the truth while others misdirect, causing both Maggie and the reader to wonder where the truth lies. The killer’s identity comes as a surprise, at least to me, although the information needed to solve the whodunit comes fairly late in the story. The parallel stories in 1993 and 2016 allow the two tracks of the story to merge effectively, eventually making clear that Maggie has more than one mystery to solve. The plot is surprisingly tight. Despite weaving together multiple characters, deaths, and time frames, it leaves no loose ends dangling.

Maggie engages in a bit too much handwringing for my taste. When the blurb compares Taylor to Tana French and Kate Atkinson, perhaps handwringing protagonists are what the blurb writer has in mind, but unlike French and Atkinson, Taylor does not make her protagonist’s anger with an unfair world unbearably sanctimonious. I liked the plot of The Mountains Wild more than I liked the protagonist, but the plot is reason enough to read the book.

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Rest and Be Thankful by Emma Glass

First published in Great Britain in 2020; published by Bloomsbury Circus on December 1, 2020

In exquisite and powerful prose, a nurse tells her story over the course of a few night shifts in a London hospital’s neonatal ward. The title notwithstanding, Laura gets no rest as she moves from baby to baby, changing lines and diapers, comforting parents, trying to relieve “the crushing weight of their worry.” She encourages fathers to hold their children rather than their cellphones. She dreads the death of her patients. Perhaps she should be thankful that her relationship with the partner who seems to despise her is ending, but he’s keeping the flat, forcing her to move into a single room in hospital residence housing.

There is value in reading about lives that a reader would never want to live. Holding a sleeping baby, Laura explains why she performs such a thankless job: “This is why I’m here. A sick baby on his way to being well. On his way to being well because of surgery, medication, holding, sleeping, something. I wish I knew which one it was because then we could do more. Save more babies. Sometimes none of it works. I think about this all the time.” Hers is a world of hope and despair in a constant struggle for supremacy.

Laura fears the struggle may be driving her mad. Perhaps it is. She is certain that she saw someone step onto the tracks of the subway she’s riding but the death she envisioned never happened. A coworker asks her what’s happening in her life “because you are always late and your hair is a bit of a mess and you don’t smell but it’s a slippery slope.” Death is never far from her mind. She starts the day on her last legs. In her sleep-deprived moments, Laura thinks she sees an apparition in black, perhaps the Grim Reaper, waiting in a hospital chair. The same figure haunts her dreams.

Laura’s life might be better without her partner, about whom we learn little. “I will miss the lick you give your lips before you speak,” Laura thinks to herself, “but I will not miss the words that follow and fall out of that wry wet mouth.” Yet it’s never quite clear whether it is her job or her partner or a traumatic event in her life that has shaped her sorrowed response to the days we glimpse.

A long road in Scotland is named Rest and Be Thankful, apparently because after a long uphill journey, travelers rest and are thankful they reached the top. Whether Laura will reach the top of her uphill climb, a place where she can rest, is unclear.

The novel is relatively short. It ends abruptly and ambiguously, resolving nothing. Readers who demand a plot won’t find one here. The story is simply Laura’s life told in a snapshot. The story left me wanting more but that’s better than a longer story that leaves me wondering why I read so many wasted words. The novel works because of Emma Glass’ ability to place the reader in Laura’s shoes, to make us feel her empathy, her frustation, her desperate unraveling.

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