Upper Middlebrow

Upper Middlebrow


Episode 15: “Big Tank! Big NUCLEAR Tank!” Jonathan Lethem’s The Arrest, Part I

April 03, 2023

Jonathan Lethem imagines not so much an apocalypse, but a kind of slow pause of most (but not all) advanced technologies, he calls “The Arrest”. Dukes and Bagg find the scenario fascinating and are not much troubled by the lack of a scientific explanation. Bagg IS troubled by the first sentence, (an important one) and Dukes wonders if our protagonist will manage to do a thing (anything!) in the book’s second half.


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