In early 2019, my friend, Tim Maughan published his excellent novel of the end of the internet / technology, Infinite Detail. It got some attention, even appearing on a few book of the year shortlists. At the back end of 2020, almost 2 years on, we have two novels with a similar premise, one, The Silence, by increasingly pretentious twerp, Don DeLillo, and the other, this one, The Arrrest, by the former bright young hope of American literature, Jonathan Lethem. Both are being praised as unprecedented and 'original'. They clearly aren't either - even Tim's novel wasn't that original in the sense that the end of technology dystopia goes back at least as far as E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops, published more than a century ago, in 1909. But are either any good? I didn't even get as far as buying the DeLillo because on looking at it in the bookshop, I burst out laughing. The 'novel' looked suspiciously small and thin to begin with even in hardback, and on opening it, you can see that they've used a very spacious font in a massive point size and huge margins. In other words this may not even be a novella. DeLillo apparently couldn't quite deliver on his promises, and I'm not paying novel price for an extended short story - I'll get it out of the library or wait until it inevitably appeats for 0.99 on Kindle...

But I did buy The Arrest. It too is a short novel, in bite-size chapters, some no more than a page. The protagonist, Sandy Duplessis AKA Journeyman, is a superannuated delivery boy in a post-technology society, which is maybe a reference to Fry from Futurama - it wouldn't surprise me, because as with all Lethem novels, The Arrest is stacked with pop culture references. This isn't hard science-fiction: the way in which the end of the internet and fossil fuels and everything has came about is vague and magical  in a 'just don't ask' sort of way. Instead the novel plays with being a meta-dystopia, which might or might not be the product of a film script that Journeyman had been writing off-and-on for years with his college buddy, later employer and highly irritating Hollywood somebody, Peter Todbaum, from an idea at least partly suggested by Journeyman's sister, Maddy. Now after the Arrest, Maddy, and in his lesser, ineffectual way, Journeyman, are both part of self-sustaining organic cooperative township way up on the Maine coast, away from all the turmoil that is apparently going on elsewhere. And then suddenly Todbaum turns up... in a nuclear-powered chrome supercar-cum-tunnelling machine that looks like something straight out of a 1950s Popular Mechanics fever dream, that he has apparently driven all the way from Malibu, complete with the world's last espresso machine. And guess what? He's still a major asshole. 

Anyone who's read Lethem will know that he can write. He's still got that smart-alecky thing going on that he's always had, but it's dialed back a bit these days. However he knows enough about genre writing and his forebears in this particular enterprize not just to make reference to other dystopian and post-apocalyse novels and films, but also to deal with that little issue that always seems to haunt such works - why don't any of the characters ever seem to know anything about science-fiction etc.? Well, in this novel they do. Journeyman and Todbaum have been writing an SF script for years after all, and Journeyman has become quite the expert on the disaster novel. George R. Stewart's classic, Earth Abides, is mentioned a couple of times, I think to emphasize that in this reality at least, we don't have the super-patriarchal society of that novel, but a strongly feminist one: the women are by far the most capable characters in The Arrest, with the main make characters a mixture of posturing, irritating, or pathetic. 

But is the book any good? I don't know. While if flirts with various SF tropes of alternate worlds and so on, it doens't actually go there, and the story is actually quite linear and while somewhat unlikely in the specifics of its denouement, it won't come as much of a surprise in any general sense. It's okay, I think is my verdict. Not challenging or shocking. Certainly not Lethem's  best. A little bit more boring than I was expecting, but a well-written, engaging read that doesn't outstay its welcome.