We study the effect of suddenly turning on a long-range interaction in a spinless Fermi gas in two dimensions. The short- to intermediate-time dynamics is described using the method of bosonization of the Fermi surface. The space-time dependence of the nonequilibrium fermion density matrix as well as the evolution after the quench of the discontinuity at the Fermi momentum of the momentum distribution are computed. We find that the asymptotic state predicted by bosonization is consistent with the existence of a prethermalization plateau, which is also predicted by a perturbative approach in terms of the fermionic degrees of freedom. The bosonized representation, however, explicitly allows for the construction of the generalized Gibbs ensemble describing the prethermalized state.Instituto de Física La Plata