The peaceful agrarian stasis of Tinderwick is disrupted when Journeyman's pre-arrest professional partner, Peter Todbaum arrives in a nuclear powered “supercar” that he has driven to Maine from California.

For Todbaum, the essential event of the motel stay was Maddy casually adding a crucial twist to a science fiction concept that he and Journeyman continued to work on all the way up to the arrest.

Initially, while Todbaum holds a sizable group in thrall, he tells a typical post-apocalyptic story of ravaged cities, marauding bands, and enclaves with science fiction technology.

Eventually, most of Todbaum's audience drift away, as he declines to finish his story by telling what happened while crossing the area controlled by The Cordon.

In the novel's climax, Journeyman remains relatively in the dark, while Maddy and much of the community carefully plan and execute a temporary move to an island, where they also construct countermeasures to a supercar attack.

You couldn’t see all of the shapes in space because he was blabbing at you.”[2]In an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books,[3] speaking to the timeliness of the story and its isolation themes during the pandemic (the novel was completed in February 2020), Lethem said that the book is, “… an intentional project made of my thoughts and feelings, developed not suddenly and on-the-spot like some sort of journalistic memorandum, but out of the weird stew of what I’ve read and noticed and thought about for decades.

I relate this novel distinctly to two earlier ones: Amnesia Moon… and Chronic City…”[3]In the same interview, Lethem connected reaching middle age with his decision to set his novel in a small town.

“I think my attraction growing up to reading dystopian and post-apocalyptic stories mingled a lot of different kinds of appetite and yearning and wondering with fears, with the kind of usual cautionary, “look out or it might get bad.” Some of that feeling is like, maybe that wouldn’t be bad, maybe that would be interesting or better.”[5]“… there’s some part of you that has an appetite for confronting the possibility that what you see around you is not a given, that it’s unstable and precarious… if you feel as I do, and I think a lot of people do, that where we are makes no sense… well, maybe you also yearn for not catastrophe in the worst sense, but for change that was just total, and that forced everyone to think differently and experience things differently and remake some of the things that are being advertised as permanent or necessary.”[5]Reviews of the novel were generally positive.

“If anything, he seems more interested in unpacking assumptions built into such tales, and why we seem to have an endless appetite for stories that, presumably, should make us feel terrible… Maybe the point is that we (both storytellers and audience members) have gotten too good at this.

There are soft spots, but then there are riffs that find an interesting line and take off into flights of extended brilliance… “The Arrest” may not show Lethem at the height of his powers, but as with so much of his work, it is inventive, entertaining and superbly written.”[6]In his negative Washington Post review,[7] Ron Charles characterized the novel as a “vast contraption” that is “clever but not funny; a satire that never pricks its target.” Charles found the plot's action to be “inaction,” writing that the novel “settles quickly into an odd stasis, sustained only by the cerebral wit of Lethem’s voice.” Charles also took issue with the protagonist, describing him as “the blandest of heroes,” who fails to achieve “the definition and purpose that has always eluded him.” In his The Guardian review,[8] Alex Preston characterized “The Arrest” as “a dystopian novel in thrall to its own genre, full of knockabout comic book bravado, with regular knowing nods to literary and cinematic history.

It is, in short, a blast.” In his LA Times review,[9] Charles Finch described the novel as “a wonderful read, the writing gracefully gonzo, the emotional beats often unexpected yet quite right.” In his USA Today review,[10] Mark Athitakis gave the novel three-out-of-four stars, writing that, “it has an unserious, gonzo attitude that’s welcome in a well-worn genre.