The American author imagines a comic-book post-apocalyptic future on a New England farm
You could trace an interesting history of recent western culture through its dystopias. From Zamyatin’s We to Brave New World to Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, it started with a mistrust of political systems. Then, in the shadow of the mushroom cloud came On the Beach, A Canticle for Leibowitz and Riddley Walker. The looming environmental crisis brought us The Drowned World, The Road and The Year of the Flood. Now a sudden rush of books explore our complex relationship with technology – Don DeLillo’s The Silence, Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind and here, Jonathan Lethem’s The Arrest. All of these dystopian visions of the near future – published within a few months of one another – imagine what would happen if the computers, telephones and networks on which we depend suddenly stopped working.