The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 2 June 2022
by Jonathan Lethem
If you're writing a post-apocalyptic novel, you're obliged to come up with something that brought about the apocalypse. It isn't as if we're short on very real reasons we could be heading for an apocalypse. Nuclear war is back in the picture, sadly. We've got a very real climate catastrophe surrounding us. At some point in the future, Earth will run out of abundant fossil fuels, making a mess of everything. And, hey, why not bring on the asteroid. Here, in Jonathan Lethem's novel, though, there is only a very vague disaster that somehow, inexplicably, all sources of power fail to work. Everything from fossil-fuel-powered engines to nuclear power plants (except...) to the combustion required to make firearms work. Solar and wind power aren't really mentioned at all. So nothing works. Everything has ground to a halt (though you can still start a fire), the world is in Arrest. There are no powered engines anywhere. Except...
It is a kind of fantasy of primitivism. We go back to the farm. Hand-made objects, hand-grown food, a kind of hyper-localized economy and social structure. In a world such as this, there are many post-apocalyptic scenarios that can unfold. So, here, we meet Peter Todbaum and Sandy Duplessis, modestly successful television writers. Todbaum is a bombastic showman seemingly riding above the fray. Sandy, who we also know as Journeyman, is more passive. He works at his trade, doesn't make any waves, gets by as the world swirls about him. One lost weekend in LA, his sister Maddy comes to town and vague obsessive interpersonal conflict ensues.
But all of this is before The Arrest, and it unfolds within Journeyman's tale of life on a remote peninsula in Maine, where his sister is a member of a communal farm, and he happens to be visiting when It All Goes Down. Journeyman fits himself into the community cast inward upon itself. There is no knowledge of what is going on beyond even a few miles away. They are confined, too, by the Cordon, a clan of tough guys riding motorcycles powered by human feces. Journeyman delivers food to the community from the farms and from the butcher. It's a living, as they say, especially since his particular talents are ill-suited for surviving the apocalypse.
Into all of this rides Todbaum, arriving from beyond the beyond, full of stories and tales of adventures and disaster. His mode of transportation is as unlikely as the science-fiction movie plots he pitched in Hollywood. Nevertheless, it is profoundly disruptive to the pastoral communities of Tinderwick. Journeyman is tired of Todbaum's bullshit, but all he can do is watch as the community falls into Todbaum's spell. All, however, is not quite as it seems. Journeyman is out of the loop, really, and his passivity keeps the background tale from the reader, too, as Todbaum's fate unfolds. The community, offered a glimpse of pre-arrest life, acts to protect its idyll. Still, we begin to doubt the story being told here. Is the world as Todbaum describes, or is it less, or is it more? Is the whole thing just an elaborate dream sequence or a vast movie pitch unfolding in the office of a Hollywood producer? Even at the end, one can't be entirely sure.