I have been a fan of Jonathan Lethem's since I discovered his work over twenty years ago. I especially love his science fiction work like Girl in Landscape and As She Crawled Across the Table. The Arrest is a return to those sorts of stories. It's science fiction that's less about the technicalities and more about the characters and their relationships in such an intensely strange moment. I was reminded a little of Robert Altman while reading with a sprawling cast of disparate characters and strains of satire about the film industry weaving their way in. This is a dystopia that actually functions, people sliding into community positions that might not have suited them before The Arrest but now seem like a natural fit. Our story focuses on what happens when this tenuous attempt to make something new gets shaken up by reminders of the old world. It's a timely tale told by a masterful writer.

His take on dystopia, which I really liked because "the arrest" was not explained and there seemed to be an insinuation that part of the story came from a movie script. Lethem consistently produces thought-provoking books.

When it comes to the end times it's great to have a little humor. And mystery. Lethem doesn't try and solve or explain what happens after The Arrest. Nor does he fully explain what the event is. Adding this mystery to the rest of the mysteries makes for a book that is, truly, at its heart a speculative novel.
The end effect of this book, like all of Lethem's novels, is one of wonder. It lingers after you've finished as the bits of the book (including the set-up of very short chapters) crystalize into a whole.

I have previously enjoyed two novels by Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn and As She Climbed Across the Table), so I was excited at the opportunity to receive an advance proof of this one in exchange for an honest review.

I have also read more than my fair share of post-apocalyptic novels. I loved Riddley Walker and Cat's Cradle (both explicitly name-checked by Lethem in the text of The Arrest), and I appreciated Station Eleven, The Road, The Stand, and Fiskadoro, to name a few.

The Arrest, however, left me almost completely cold. None of the characters are particularly sympathetic, the plot is thin enough to be explained in two sentences, and the prose is over-stylized. I feel like I didn't really appreciate what Lethem was going for with this one...maybe it's an inside joke for screenwriters that I just didn't understand.

In any case, I can't recommend this one.

THE ARREST by Jonathan Lethem is a fun novel about a man in a post apocalyptic world. I really liked how the main character, Journeyman, was like me as the reader who didn’t know what was going on this world or what anyone else was thinking. We were both just going along for the ride and seeing what happens. I also really liked the short chapters and the many clever beginnings of those chapters. Maybe I expected more to happen in the end so I felt the ending was lacking but it was a fun journey to get there.

Wow wow wow! What can I say, this book is fun!!! It has a slow start, fun middle, and stellar ending. Get it as soon as possible!

This is an odd book. It has some type of plot, a lot of chapters dedicated to the back story of the main character. Journeyman is the main character, he was visiting his sister in Maine when the Arrest happened, now he is stuck there. The arrest caused loss of computers, planes, motorized cars etc, what caused the arrest is never really explain. His old friend Todbaum shows up having driven across the country in a nuclear powered car, this character talks a lot and provides some of the more boring parts of the book. I didn't dislike the book but I certainly wouldn't read it again.

I've been a fan of Lethem's for years mostly because I love Brooklyn and enjoy the colorful descriptions, history and even the crime. Without that appeal, I felt like the Arrest was based on a weird dream, the sort of dream many people are having these days.

This arrest of time in which technology suddenly stops seemed attractive in many ways but as a chemical analyst I kept looking for a logical explanation. The characters mostly took this arrest in stride although I would have expected that more people would have found the circumstances depressing.
The Arrest is clever and the writing is as always with Lethem, brilliant, but the story itself left me wanting.
I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. While I appreciate having had the opportunity since this book will likely be considered a classic, it wasn't my favorite.

This is a very strange book.............not so sure I really liked it, but can't think of any reason I didn't, except it is super strange!

Thank you, Net Galley, for an advance copy for an honest review.
It was interesting. The writing was good, and I did read it quickly. The world is fallen apart, and Sandy is living near his sister who runs an organic farm. His old boss, Todbaum from LA drives up in an almost indestructible vehicle.
The book went along but several questions were not answered. I am not sure this book was for me. I am giving it 3 stars because the writing kept me interested trying to figure out what was going on.

And Your Point Is...?

It's by Jonathan Lethem, so you expect, and get, some sharp lines, amusing digressions, eccentric characters, and unusual and well imagined scenes and situations. That said, the characters mostly just wander around in an unconvincingly presented post-apocalyptical world that serves more as an extended and obvious metaphor than an actual setting. I did like the fact that everything mechanical or in any way advanced simply slowly stopped working, (the "Arrest"), because it was overcome by whatever the machine version is of creeping existential dread. Lethem had some fun with that, but even then it was all a bit dry and mannered. And that was pretty much it for the book.

(Please note that I received a free ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

Thank you to Harper Collins for allowing me to read this copy.
The book The Arrest, is a futuristic narrative, about a shrunken world. It is a movement of people to one community,. It consists of a few small towns in the northeast in the USA. All know material items, like IPhones, cars, airplanes, restaurants are no longer in existence. There is a patrol of people, the Cordon group, who do not allow you to leave and will be violent if necessary. The people remain safe as long as the cordons are provided food from the group.

There are a few main characters through which the story unfolds. There is Mr Duplessis, also known as , Sandy and Journeyman. He is a middleman and delivers food as his main job. There is Toadbum, who lived in Malibu, CA. Sandy use to work with him in Hollywood. Sandy was a like an editor for the stuff Toadbaum wrote or produced. However Sandy went to the East coast before Toadbaum showed up.

In addition, Sandy has a daughter Maddie, who already was there and who operates the farm to feed the people..

The story gets going when Toadbaum arrives in the vehicle the Blue Streak. It is not of this world. There is much written about the vehicle and Toadbaum concerning the vehicles AI and futuristic capabilities. There is also a book being written by him, Yet another world.. It is about an alternative world with no borders, AI and virtual reality in a sustainable world.

I am not a lover of science fiction or futuristic modalities. However, if that is your thing then delve in to this book. It makes you think about what if? There are a lot of interesting exchanges and what is the purpose of the vehicle and what happens to it all provides for an interesting finish.

The Arrest by Jonathan Lethem is one of the more interesting and inventive sci-fi books I’ve read in a long time. It’s well written and full of interesting, if not necessarily likable, characters. The chapters are short and eminently readable. I was engaged from beginning to end and read it quickly. The book is almost the antithesis of most science fiction in that it’s set in a world where none of our modern day conveniences exists, and everyone is living as they did before the advent of modern technology. The time that all modern conveniences finally fail to work and come to a complete stop, one after the other, is known as The Arrest. The two main characters are roommates, friends and colleagues in Hollywood prior to The Arrest, but one, Peter, eventually far outshines and out-earns the other, Sandy.

At the time of The Arrest, Sandy is stranded at his sister’s organic, East coast farm, while Peter is still on the west coast. Eventually, Peter rumbles into Sandy’s life again and upsets the farm and it’s surrounding towns and their residents. How he does this and how he’s dealt with are the crux of this dystopian story.

It's often said that in troubled times, you get what you deserve--and this new book by exalted author Jonathan Lethem, known for his unique take on a story and setting, is exactly what we need right now. It takes place in a dystopian society, ours, that has completely lost modern technology, it has been arrested (stopped, not gone to jail). Why? We don't really know but all signs point to blaming humans on society's collapse. Sound familiar? Though mostly a narrative-based story that contains short, choppy chapters that run back and forth in time, we see this collapse and hear the story through our protagonist, the Journeyman, who is confused by the times and life as, we are now. Everyone else seems to be coping well, some even thriving in this new environment as the Journeyman, well, goes through a self-discover journey about his place in society. Wow how this hits home. It's an interesting story, very well written and enjoyable, moving along a a fast clip. It is full of unexpected occurrences that become familiar and expected. It's amazing how humans can adapt.

I'm returning the book. Not my type of book. Sorry! Thank you for the opportunity!
I marked it one star!

My send to Kindle link doesn't seem to be working with this book. It moves a little bit when I click it but there isn't any further response.

I have long been a fan of Jonathan Lethem, in particular his way of playing with genre (As She Climbed Across the Table, Gun with Occasional Music). The arrival is another one of those great mixes. It has some dystopia, some post-apocalypse, a bit of utopia, and Lethem pulls it all off wonderfully. The world here isn’t overrun by some evil creature, there isn’t starvation or fanatical death waiting for the people in Tinderwick, the apocalypse was more everything stopping, screens going dead, and people just figuring out what jobs they could do so that everyone could keep on keeping on. At least that is how the protagonist Journeyman sees it. Unfortunately for Journeyman, who in his previous life was a Hollywood script doctor, he has a hard time finding his place among the people with skills that help with the survival of everyone else. This displacement is amplified when a friend from his past in a shiny futuristic car comes crashing into his and the other residents of Tinderwick’s lives.

One of the first words that came to my mind about this book, is that it is comfortable. I could say, it is down right cozy. Unlike other books in these genres, there isn’t the constant cloud of annihilation hanging overhead, no edge of your seat escapes from mutants or monsters in the dark. This isn’t a book that is going to have massive sci-fi set pieces or even pitched battles, so if that is what you are thinking as you dive in, you may need to adjust your expectations. The stakes, for the most part, aren’t high. The arrival of Peter Todbaum and his Super Car is more a disruption and a weight on Journeyman, but everyone else seems to be in control.
Lethem’s writing is beautiful and that makes the book engrossing on its own. I was personally surprised how quickly and ravenously I read it.

There is, some lack of depth when it comes to characters. As important a role as Journeyman’s sister seems to be to the narrative, I don’t feel like I got nearly enough of her. I did have a couple of moments where I realized that the character I was reading was her girlfriend and not her.

Overall though, it was great to read some new Lethem and spend some time in his version of the post-apocalyptic.

Thanks to Netgalley and ECCO for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

Thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins Publishers for sending me an ARC of The Arrest in exchange for an honest review.

I’ve only read one other book by Mr. Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn, but I quite enjoyed it. And the description of The Arrest sounded cool, so know that I went in with high hopes. But as you may have guessed, this book did not work for me.

There’s not much plot to speak of. Alexander “Sandy” Duplessis, aka The Journeyman, was visiting his sister Maddy on her organic farm in Maine when all the machines stopped working. A Hollywood screenwriter, he’s carved out a simple life for himself there, until his former boss, Peter Todbaum, shows up in a nuclear-powered supercar called The Blue Streak. Strange tension ensues.

Sometimes Literary Fiction just works. It’s brilliantly written, full of richly drawn characters, social commentary and observations. And sometimes it doesn’t work. The writing is good, but the meaning is too oblique and inaccessible, the character’s actions and motivations too hard to understand, and the story seems to go nowhere. Unfortunately, The Arrest fell into this later category for me. Why did Todbaum travel across the country to find Sandy and Maddy? What was the entire story supposed to mean? I still don’t really know. The book was readable, and amusing in places, but was ultimately unsatisfying.

I liked it, but didn't love it. "The Arrest" is the story of a Maine community enduring a post-disaster world. (I can't quite say apocalypse.) There has been an incident--The Arrest-- in which our machines and technology have ceased to work.

I found my favorite parts of the novel were the flashbacks to the characters' life before things went to hell. So perhaps this is a reflection of my lack of interest in "beware the future" fiction. Perhaps because 2020 is grim enough as is. But if dystopia IS your thing, you can safely bump this up to 4 stars because the writing is very good. I've always liked Lethem, but this one didn't quite hit the highs I'm always hopeful for when I open up one of his books.

Netgalley provided me with an e-copy of the book in return for this review.

Jonathan Lethem reinvents his oeuvre in nearly every novel. I can't think of many writers who leap so fearlessly from one genre to the next, riffing on formulas while blowing up notions of what can and cannot be done in conventional forms. The Arrest tackles a common trope, but with an intriguing twist. In this post-apocalyptic setting, all technology, from airplanes to guns, has simply ceased to function. The main character, Sandy Duplessis, is a sad sack who just happened to be visiting his organic farmer of a sister on the east coast when the world falls apart. They form a small communal enclave that seems idyllic until Sandy's past inexplicably shows up, and the community is forced to respond. I almost always enjoy Lethem's novels, and this one is something of a return to his more freewheeling genre-busters like Gun, With Occasional Music and Girl in Landscape. Highly recommended.