
The Arrest
A Novel
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- اطلاعات
- نقد و بررسی
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نقد و بررسی

July 13, 2020
Lethem (The Feral Detective) returns with a lukewarm tale of an apocalypse set in the very near future. Sandy Duplessis worked as a screenwriter in Los Angeles with his friend Peter Todbaum. Then came the Arrest, an unexplained event that caused computers and other technology to stop working and reduced everyone to locavores. In the aftermath, Sandy, who calls himself Journeyman, ends up in rural Maine working as a butcher and delivering food grown by his sister, Maddy. When Todbaum shows up and starts pursuing Mandy, their simple life gets complicated. The locals feel threatened by Todbaum’s presence, and Sandy, who is unnerved by Todbaum’s claim that he predicted the Arrest, wonders if his old friend can be trusted, while Maddy, who begins sleeping with Todbaum, becomes his sole defender. Lethem’s prose is as great as ever (“Journeyman was a middle person, a middleman. Always locatable between things, and therefore special witness in both directions, to extremes remote to one another, an empathic broker between irreconcilable poles—or so he flattered himself”), but despite the fine writing, the plot fails to coalesce into something engaging, the Arrest remains murky, and many scenes feel disjointed. Still, the project crackles and hums with witty dialogue and engaging ideas. While it’s not entirely satisfying, Lethem’s fans won’t mind.

Listening to Jonathan Lethem's imaginative new novel is like listening to someone's wild but strangely relevant pandemic dream. Here, technology has been "arrested," along with most of modern civilization. On the coast of Maine, "at the end of land and time," a small agrarian enclave survives in relative peace and tranquility--though not for long. Narrator Robert Fass maintains a necessary balance between the familiar and the fantastic, portraying a cast of characters who range from bedrock New Englander to West Coast transient. The narrative is brisk, compressing 79 chapters into just seven and a half hours. Lethem's prose is, as always, fluent, concise, and studded with sharp images and insights that seem surprisingly apt and prescient of the moment. D.A.W. � AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
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