From the award-winning author of The Feral Detective and Motherless Brooklyn comes an utterly original postapocalyptic yarn about two siblings, the man that came between them, and a nuclear-powered super car. The Arrest isn?t post-apocalypse. It isn?t a dystopia. It isn?t a utopia. It?s just what happens when much of what we take for granted?cars, guns, computers, and airp From the award-winning author of The Feral Detective and Motherless Brooklyn comes an utterly origin...
| Title | : | The Arrest |
| Author | : | Jonathan Lethem |
| Rating | : | |
| Genres | : | Fiction |
| ISBN | : | The Arrest ISBN |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 320 pages pages |
The Arrest Reviews
I'm annoyed when a blurb says a book is an "utterly original" example of a genre, then the actual book turns out to be a fairly generic entry. It's almost like the author is ashamed to say they wrote a X-type book so they want to say "This ain't your grand...
This review originally published in Looking For a Good book. Rated 2.0 of 5 Sandy Duplessis was living a good life. He was living in Los Angeles and working as a screenwriter. His writing partner is his old college friend Peter Todbaum, and the charismatic Todbaum has become a king ...
It's the summer of 2020, I don't need to read a novel about a dystopian world with an uncertain future, I can turn on CNN, or watch a city council meeting about masks. I read this book anyway, because Jonathan Lethem's name is on it (Well, he wrote it. If you wrote his n...
?Some say the world will end in fire,? Robert Frost wrote, ?Some say in ice.? But in this era of terrifying dystopias, Jonathan Lethem imagines a kinder, gentler apocalypse: no pandemic laying waste to humanity, no asteroid shattering the Earth, no zombies snacking on us. In...
** I read an advance reader copy of this book that I won through a Goodreads giveaway. ** This book was really neither good nor bad. It just existed. The writing was a bit pretentious and not what I generally like. The main character had no personality or reason for existing. It was...
Jonathan Lethem's The Arrest is an odd take on a muted post-apocalyptic future after The Arrest, an extended event during which all tech, from TV to the internet to cell phones, stop working. The protagonist, Alexander "Sandy" Dupless is left stranded (vehicles using con...
Well, I didn't hate it. You may accuse me of damning with faint praise, but the truth is, Lethem's written several novels I hated in the past decade. The logical question to now ask is, Why do I keep reading them? There are a few reasons: His early promise--not seen in a l...
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. ... Their banter felt perfunctory and empty, dress rehearsal for a show that had closed years before. ... He?d come wishing to hear the truth beneath the lies, or beneath the stories, the mad pastiche?a recombinant hash of truth and u...
I love Lethem's style. This book is about fear, relationships, family dynamics, not knowing who you are or what you should do with your life, how the circumstances of life determine what your choices are, how your personality determines what your choices are, the role of technolog...
The book description was very interesting. What would happen if our cars, airplanes computers etc. stop working. I didn't finish this book. I got lost in the language and the description. It reminded me of some of the less popular Dean Koontz books that describe every detail. I do...
A solid, if ultimately likely unmemorable, curio from Lethem. This one feels a lot like his early stuff, like GIRL IN LANDSCAPE early, in its brash insistence on being its own thing and damn the torpedoes. It's slight, pulling back when it maybe ought to push forward, but it shou...
After Lethem's recent novel The Feral Detective, I didn't know what to expect. This is an unconventional post-apocalyptic novel. Contrary to the blurb, I would not call it dystopian. Apart from the metafictional antics of its screenwriter main character, it comes alive with h...
The setting and premise of this novel are quite... arresting. ...
Book Review: The Arrest Author: Jonathan Lethem Publisher: HarperCollins Ecco Publication Date: November 10, 2020 Review Date: November 4, 2020 From the blurb: ?From the award-winning author of The Feral Detective and Motherless Brooklyn comes an utterly original post-colla...
Strange story with characters that had unknown motivation and were hard to relate to. Action is limited. I quite possibly missed the whole point. Thanks to HarperCollins and NetGalley for the ARC to read and review. ...
Thanks to Harper Collins for the ARC. I promise honest, not nice, so here goes. If Jonathan Franzen were to write a post-apocalyptic novel, it might be something like this. Many people would consider a comparison to Jonathan Franzen a compliment. I am not one of them. If I want di...- At the library where I work, there are quite a few patrons who enjoy a sub-genre called "cozy mystery," where somebody usually gets murdered, but other than the murder, everything is very pleasant and nice. With "The Arrest," Jonathan Lethem has written a sort of co...
An interesting read during an interesting time in our world. The Arrest is a time when everything in the world just stopped working. We never really learn why this happened just that it did. I was really interested in this event, and would have liked to hear more about it. We pick up...
Reading this reminded me why I don't read white males anymore. All the main characters are white males. There are some women, but they're only there to react to what they men do, they don't really have much agency, thought, etc. of their own. Oh, and there's one non...
My thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins for allowing me to read this e-proof. I was excited to get a chance to read it because I always love to read books that take place in Maine. I live just down the road from a fictional town called ?Salem?s Lot, which totally creeped me out wh...
Jonathon Lethem has carved himself out a comfortable hole in the literary pop culture crossover sphere. Starting with high concept low weirdness science fiction and then hitting big with Motherless Brooklyn, he has always been pretty very readable but sometimes the big ideas get lost i...
If you mixed a Jasper Fforde novel with When Androids Dream of Electric sheep, perhaps. It was enjoyable, though I?d like it even more if I wasn?t living in a dystopian future. It was a fast, enjoyable read and in a world where it didn?t seem like a possible future. I would have ...
"...he might simply be lonely. Journeyman was crazy with loneliness or lonely with craziness...some days Journeyman thought the world had been crazy and tried to go sane: that was The Arrest." I think the above is as close as I came to understanding The Arrest by Jonathan ...
Dystopian novel about the world after ?The Arrest? of progress. One of his recent books that I actually enjoyed quite a bit. Before this effort my feeling was that Lethem had stumbled upon a bit of a dry spell and I was doubting his ability to return to prominence. ...
This book was both too much and not enough. Too much: The writing is possibly the most pretentious I've encountered. It gets better (or just bearable) after the first 50 pages, but those first few chapters were a slog. Not enough: The title of this book references something...
[Won in Goodreads.com giveaway. Thank you, Mr Lethem, for making pre-publication copies available.] I read an UNCORRECTED PROOF. The final printed version (expected publication 10 November 2020) may be slightly or substantially different. Keep this in mind when reading any less-than...
"Dystopia and postapocalypse, two great tastes that taste great together." The world as we know it ends. For no particular reason, or maybe all of them, everything just stops. In Jonathan Lethem's The Arrest, the why of it is hardly the point. The point is that our wo...
This was dull. It was really, really dull. The story reads like a first draft jotted down on a napkin, only it's... Not. I should have LOVED it, as its all things I love in a book. It's odd, and I'm a sucker for anything a bit odd. It's a post-apocalyptic story, but...
It?s been reviewed positively elsewhere but unfortunately, for me, The Arrest didn?t hold up to the promise of its premise. It wasn?t as funny as I?d hoped, the characters were flat, and the plot was all fits and starts. It?s a post-apocalyptic pastoral-cum-steampunk fever dr...
Science-fiction author Brian Aldiss coined the term cosy catastrophe, as a way to describe sci-fi stories in which a world-ending event wipes out most of human life, leaving a group of nice, middle-class white people to calmly and in relative comfort rebuild some sense of normality (Al...
