The Arrest, by Jonathan Lethem (Ecco, 307 pages)
Despite a vague discomfort with what it says about me, there’s never been an apocalypse I didn’t like. In 1998, when everyone was asking why America needed two asteroid disaster movies released within two months of each other (Deep Impact and Armageddon), I was wondering why we couldn’t have three.
So I was stoked for Jonathan Lethem’s latest, The Arrest, even more because it’s set in New England. Its premise seems the perfect antidote to 2020: a world in which all modern technology has stopped working. No more planes, trains and automobiles, no laptops, no electric blankets, no Googling, no doomscrolling. The doom is already here, and it’s not as bad as predicted. In fact, if you are the type who thinks wistfully about living off the grid on an organic farm one day, this is not the apocalypse, but paradise.
The disappearance of technology, which unfolded slowly, as opposed to one catastrophic event, has been dubbed “The Arrest.” The citizens aren’t sure what happened, but it appears the apex event in a long line of losses to include biodiversity, the melting of polar ice and the drowning of Miami. There were apparently no riots and mass human deaths, however, just a pervasive sadness at the loss of our cellphones. Some built shrines to them; others “needed eventually to be given a mug of herbal tea while someone else hid their inert former playthings.”
Our escort through this world is one Sandy Duplessis, a Hollywood screenwriter whose primary job, pre-Arrest, was to rewrite the work of others, and to enjoy whatever scrap-work was tossed to him by a longtime friend who has been much more successful than he was.
Sandy’s world is much different now. For one thing, he goes by the quaint moniker Journeyman, and his job is to deliver food and other necessities of life around the town in rural Maine where he has settled. He also assists the local butcher and has acquired an unsettling amount of knowledge about how to slaughter ducks.
He has settled in this town because it’s where his sister, Maddy, lives on an organic farm; he had come to visit her when the Arrest occurred. Now, for reasons that are unclear, New England has dealt with its collective loss of smartphones by organizing itself into Walking Dead-esque communities, taking care of their own but keeping their distance from other, threatening communities. Mostly, this works; life has essentially reverted to the 19th century, where all communities need is one everything: one butcher, one fisherman, one seamstress, one mediocre former screenwriter who ferries around homemade sausage.
People may miss their former lives; they certainly miss coffee. They nurse deep sorrow about the relationships they have lost. But they still have hot mulled cider and there’s currently no trauma, no drama, until Journeyman’s old friend, the smooth-talking mogul, shows up in a monstrous, futuristic rocket-ship of a car: a supercar that could decapitate intruders, run on nuclear fuel and make espresso.
The friend, Peter Todbaum, said he’d spent 10 months driving across what was left of the country to find Journeyman, and Journeyman’s sister, with whom he had a complicated history. (When Maddy visited the two men when they were newbies in Hollywood, she and Todbaum shared a weekend together that had apparently shattered her, although he doesn’t know the details. She only told her brother, cryptically, “He didn’t do anything to me that he doesn’t do to you.”)
Todbaum’s arrival sets up the mystery: What is he doing here? Is the supercar real? Is any of this real? In Malibu the friends had been working on a script called Yet Another World, with Maddy’s help. And when Todbaum arrives and Journeyman hoists himself into the vehicle, Lethem writes, “He climbed into surely that most abhorrent of things, a mixed metaphor.”
The unspooling of the answers provides only limited satisfaction, in part because the novel is so strange, and no single character endearing. There is also the matter of Lethem’s self-indulgent musings, which seem like observations he’s jotted in his journal over a lifetime and wants to put to use. Example: his recurring mention of “time averaging,” which he defines as the mental gymnastics in which we reconcile the younger version of people we know with the aged version confronting us today.
Another example: his introductory aside into a quirk of the wintry Northeast, frost heaves, which Lethem describes as “a verb itself frozen.”
“Maybe Frost is in fact a person, that poet we studied in high school. Frost heaves into the mind. His road diverged; ours doesn’t. Thought, really, isn’t any road you could follow in either of two directions divergent enough to begin with?” he writes, losing a third of potential readers from the get-go.
But Lethem, the author of 11 well-regarded novels including Motherless Brooklyn and several collections of short stories, is at the stage of his career where he can write what he wants, unmolested. His latest is not a bad book, just a meandering one that ultimately fails to, well, arrest. C — Jennifer Graham
BOOK NOTES
If the No.1 measure of success in America is the amount of money you make, No. 2 might be that people want to know what you read. Consider Oprah. A longstanding feature of her magazine (which ends next month, at least in paper form) is what she’s reading.
But after Oprah, Americans care passionately about what Bill Gates reads.
It seems there’s always some new breathless recommendation emanating from the Microsoft founder, the latest of which I came across on Medium under the headline “Bill Gates Just Declared This Optimistic Read His New Favorite Book of All Time.”
Gates declared this his “new” favorite book of all time in 2018. But if you are wondering, it was Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now (Penguin, 576 pages), which replaced Gates’ previous favorite book, also by Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (Penguin, 832 pages).
For something more recent, Gates recommended a handful of other books on his blog earlier this year. (Why has no one started Bill’s Book Club? He is said to read 50 books a year, by reading a minimum of an hour at a sitting.) A sampling of his recommendations this year:
Good Economics for Hard Times, by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee (Public Affairs, 432 pages), the case for “intelligent interventionism” in public policy to solve inequality.
The Ride of a Lifetime, Lessons Learned from 15 years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company, by Robert Iger (Random House, 272 pages). “One of the best business books I’ve read in several years,” Gates says.
The Headspace Guide to Meditation and Mindfulness, by Andy Puddicombe (St. Martin’s Griffin, 224 pages). Gates says he started to meditate after reading this book.
The Choice, by Dr. Edith Eva Eger, a memoir and guide to processing trauma (Scribner, 320 pages). Added bonus for this title: It’s also endorsed by Winfrey, who has said, “I’ll be forever changed by Dr. Eger’s story.”
Featured photo: The Arrest