This is an Exquisite Corpse of a novel — or if you prefer another name for that particular game, Heads, Bodies and Legs, or Combination Man, or perhaps most appositely Consequences. The parlour game involves creating something and then passing along the hidden creation to which another then adds, and The Arrest reads like Jonathan Lethem playing the game against himself.
He is a novelist whose work has always experimented with, and evaded, genres. In this one, he is juggling dystopia, Thoreau-like idealism, science fiction, folk horror, sentimentality, revenge plot and quite a lot more. It is also very funny. I did want to say that it is like Cormac McCarthy animated by Hanna-Barbera, but Lethem gets there first, since one scene is a — loving? — evisceration of the plot holes in The Road. (‘If McCarthy was honest, he’d admit he wrote a campfire story… instead he inserts all this Old Testament shit. The world’s reduced and cleansed, the ambiguity scrubbed out.’)
The Arrest of the title is, was, will be an event after which almost all technologies fail, from aeroplanes to the internet to guns. The protagonist is now called Journeyman, but was known in a past life as Sandy Duplessis. Except he wasn’t truly known. He worked for a college friend, Peter Todbaum, endlessly revising scripts for films and series that were never made.
When the Arrest happened, he was coincidentally and luckily off to see his sister Maddy, who is running a co-operative organic farm. The co-operation depends on her enforced consent to things. There, with no skills to speak of except taking provisions around, Sandy becomes Journeyman. There is little use for script editors, but dropping off supplies to the local weirdo (obsessed with Sei Shonagon), helping the butcher deal with free-range ducks and liberated turkeys, means he has a function.
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