Hello and welcome to my final book review for the year 2020! I finally finished this book at nearly the last possible minute. I started it in October, got about halfway through it, and then one thing led to another and it kept getting pushed to the back of the line, and I didn’t finally pick it up to finish it until two days ago. This completes my reading for the year. I officially read 46 books this year. My goal was 50, but I’m still very happy with what I managed. And so, without further ado, my last book review of 2020!

Title: The Arrest
Author: Jonathan Lethem
Release Date: 10 Nov 2020
Source: ARC provided by publisher
Rating: 3.5 stars

Well let me start by saying I’m still unsure about the rating. I keep going back and forth between 3.5 and 4 stars. I LIKED this book. I generally love Jonathan Lethem. This book is WEIRD, and I can’t decide how I feel about it. I went in kind of knowing what to expect, having read plenty of other Lethem books. His first two books – Gun, With Occasional Music and Amnesia Moon – are still my favorites, and lord knows THOSE are weird-as-shit books. And yet… this book did not go in any direction I was prepared for and I’m just not sure how I feel.

So, here’s the rundown: The Arrest is a genre-defying post-apocalyptic novel of a kind only Jonathan Lethem could write. It takes us to a United States we would almost, but not quite, recognize, where Sandy Duplessis, aka “Journeyman,” and his sister, Maddie, have become stranded in a sleepy New England town after an unknown catastrophic event causes all technology to fail. With cars dead, communication evaporated, and roads disintegrating, cities and towns across America have become separate isolated city-states. Maddie has adapted, becoming a farmer and respected town citizen. Journeyman has floundered, once a prominent tv writer, now an ersatz delivery man. And then something even stranger than the initial catastrophe happens: a charismatic man named Peter Todbaum from Journeyman’s past appears from nowhere, with seemingly the only car left in the world that actually works. He claims to have driven from California to the East Coast across an America gone wild and savage. And the changes he brings with him could upend the fragile peace the town has built.

Todbaum was a producer before the cataclysmic event they call “The Arrest.” Friends from college, Journeyman and Todbaum had worked together on many scripts for tv and movies, but Todbaum’s main obsession was a dystopian/post-apocalyptic film he could never finish or get into production. In addition, he has remained obsessed with Journeyman’s sister after a brief encounter more than 10 years previously, though she hates him and refuses to speak to him. In his giant nuclear-powered former-drilling-machine vehicle, Todbaum brings unrest and violence into the sleepy New England town, along with the first espresso any has seen in three years, and his increasingly grandiose, fragmented far-fetched stories of driving across America.

Meanwhile, Journeyman is a frankly, spineless man who walks through the whole story nearly mindless and asleep. He does whatever any tells him to do, including the increasingly deranged Todbaum. He never asks questions, objects to anything happening to or around him, or tries to act on anything he thinks or feels. He was frustrating as hell, honestly. I’m pretty sure that was part of the point, but what do I know?

The prose, as anything Lethem writes, is wry and sharp and funny in an unsettling kind of way. Lethem creates colorful images of this world gone insane with spare well placed detail. The main characters are complex and the large cast of side characters are painted with careful brush strokes that highlight the oddities that help them live in the face of this new version of the world. 

This novel is strange, oddly-funny, and dream-like: a cross between post-apocalyptic tale and magical realism, with a healthy dose of philosophical rumination and a treatise on the inherent weirdness of the human condition. There are no straight answers here. Lethem loves his non-ending endings, and this one is right up there with the best of them! You will get little closure or resolution from this novel. But the questions will leave you thinking, often grumbling and occasionally laughing, far past the final page.