Before moving to California, Jonathan Lethem set novels in the gentrifying Brooklyn of his youth. With 'Brooklyn Crime Novel,' he wants to correct the record.
A little more than halfway into Jonathan Lethem’s
The Arrest comes a chapter titled “Postapocalyptic and Dystopian Stories”, in which the screenwriter protagonist and his movie-producer friend debate the appeal of such tales while name-checking a panoply of authors and titles – Vonnegut, King, Atwood, Walter Tevis, Philip K. Dick, George R. Stewart, Walter M. Miller, Emily St. John Mandel, Russell Hoban, and especially Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy’s
The Road “bugs the fuck out of me,” complains the producer, calling it “postapocalyptic comfort food” and arguing that, far from offering real cautionary tales, most of these writers “can’t help it, they like it there. They