The Leftovers

Well this was an interesting pick to read at the beginning of quarantine! In the book, a host of people from one town just evaporate into thin air one day, leaving their loved ones to deal with the fall-out of immediate and widespread loss in a community. The book explores the aftermath as several people in the town form a cult of silence, total asceticism, but also a weird kind of pseudoterrorism that then looms over the rest of the community that are trying to continue their lives “normally.” It's an interesting meditation on existentialism and the ways we move through grief.

Here's an especially compelling idea for a book: A Rapture-like event occurs and millions of people disappear from the earth. What happens to those who are left behind, the leftovers? And what were the stories of those who disappeared?

This is the basic plot behind Tom Perrotta's book, The Leftovers.

Have you ever read a book like Arthur Hailey's Airport, with an enormous cast of characters and lots of action? A book that feels like a strange combination of a soap opera and an action movie. That's what The Leftovers reminded me of. It's full of women running around on their men and men running around on their women, and men double-crossing other men, and women ranting about other women. There is also this odd angst and anomie that hangs over the characters, a sense of what-do-we-do-now, that has characters abandoning their spouses and leaving home to join strange cults.

Thank you to the publisher who provided this copy for review.

A co-worker was telling me about this book (and HBO series) and I was kind of like, whatever, the Rapture, and then she mentioned the weird cults, and I was like, okay, I'm in.

I enjoyed this well enough. It was a pretty fast read, and predictably I liked the cult parts best.

It's kind of frustrating that if this were sci-fi or fantasy or anything else, there would be some kind of explanation given for the Sudden Disappearance, but since this is ~literary fiction~ it's just a ~metaphor for loss and grief~ and no explanation is given. The genre fiction part of me secretly says: eat a dick, literary fiction.

The Leftovers by Tom Perotta

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I came to this book after watching a couple of episodes of the HBO series. As is my wont, I was looking for some insight into the backstory and explanation for the television series. It is always interesting to see how television writers mutate the book's storylines for incomprehensible reasons.

The book starts three years after the “Sudden Disappearance,” when some small but unspecified number of people in the world's population disappeared from existence in a split second. The disappearances seem to have been entirely random, with some clusters in families, and other families unaffected. The Sudden Disappearance (“SD”) resembles the Rapture invented in the late 19th century by a small Protestant sect which has become a late-arising, outsized doctrine among certain Evangelical sects.

So, naturally, the book is mostly focused on the “religious” implications of the SD, ignoring the fact that most Christian churches, including Catholicism, do not have a doctrine of the Rapture. The author insists on treating the SD as a kind of challenge to mainline Christianity in a kind of wooden, 21st-century atheist way. Thus, we get a picture of people losing faith in Christianity, while taking up oddball cults and fads.

We are explicitly told through a minor, minor character - Rev. Jameson, who gets a bigger role in the television show and is turned into the brother of Norah Durst - that many of the people taken in the SD were sinners. So, we know it was not the Rapture UNLESS God is really a Calvinist, in which case, the Presbyterians should be increasing their market share.

The author's conventional bias against religion is unfortunate. The real challenge of an SD would be to the scientific worldview. The SD is outside the scope of science as we can possibly conceive it. Worse still, if it is a scientific phenomenon, when is it going to happen again? How would the SD affect science? Would people still have “faith” in science? What answers would science propose? Would people start believing in occult power or dark Lovecraftian entities?

We don't know because the book is not really interested in the SD except as a plot device to shake up the ant colony. No one speculates about what happened. We hear nothing about a scientific explanation or what the government is saying or doing.

What we get are several storylines that focus on average people living their average lives. Thus, we have Kevin, a successful businessman turned mayor of Mapleton. His wife, Laurie, has abandoned the family to join the Guilty Remnants (the “GR”), a cult that does not want people to forget the SD. His daughter Jill has allowed her grades to drop since Laurie abandoned the family and she has gotten into questionable sexual activities. His son, Tom, has joined the mission of the Holy Wayne, the proponent of the Holy Hug. Wayne is a typical religious scam artist/cultist with a taste for minor Asian girls. Tom has his doubts about Wayne but is shepherding Holy Wayne's pregnant fourth wife around America as a result of Wayne being arrested on the usual fare for which religious shysters generally get arrested. Then there is Norah Durst, who lost her entire family in the SD and has never recovered.

The book relates how these lives, situated in their own context, play out over the course of the fourth year after the SD.

This book makes no effort to solve the mystery of the SD. For the most part, although there are constant call-backs to the SD, such that it is a fact in the lives of most people, it is simply a fact like 9/11 or the Civil War: People disappeared and their families, friends, and associates have to deal with the sadness or inconvenience of losing a child or a teammate on a softball team.

The book really doesn't go anyplace, until the last pages. For example, Kevin has lost Laurie. Will she come back? Will he get involved with Norah? The answer is, initially, no and, then, maybe in the last lines of the book after an incredibly improbable set of events connects Holy Wayne to his 4th wife to Tom to Norah at the last minute to provide the one moment of light in a generally somber story.

Likewise, at the last minute, we learn how evil the GR really is, which we probably could have guessed from their nihilistic, prevent-anyone-from-enjoying-themselves ministry.

I approached this in the vein of a science fiction story because of the science fiction/paranormal premise. I wanted to see some speculation about the effects of a crypto-rapture on society. The only place where there was some imagination about that subject in the book involved the various new religious movements that were mentioned. Thus, the Holy Wayne cult was a typical cult with a charismatic leader. People were shown as being drawn to Wayne because they were depressed after the SD with its unexplained losses of friends and family members. Anyone who lived through the gut-punch of 9/11 knows that feeling (and, yet, there was not a rise in cult religion.) The Barefoot People were another variation. They were imagined as basically 1960s hippies looking for hedonism in what seemed to be an increasingly nihilistic culture.

The GR was really the author's best offering in terms of imagination and speculation. They were weird with their vow of silence and chain-smoking. None of it was explained, but Perotta generated a sense of nihilism in his scenes with them, but he didn't offer an explanation about what attracted any particular person to them. Typically, cults generate a sense of belonging, and we see some of that in the approach of Ms. Maffey to Jill, but we are also told that the GR actively opposes cult members from getting familiar with each other (except when they do, the GR moves to death cult mode.) Sociologically, the GR makes no sense, but there is an interesting story to be told about the nihilistic group that controls the GR and what their agenda is.

Honestly, I think that there was a much more interesting story to be told concerning Laurie's life after the last pages of the book.

In sum, this is a character-driven story. It is not plot-driven. If you want a plot and answers, this is not your story. If you want to read about characters, then it might be. For myself, I think that it was just beginning to find its footing when it ended.

A welcome return to form for Tom Perrotta after the somewhat disappointing ‘The Abstinence Teacher.' Leftovers' plot device is refreshingly original and thought-provoking: what would happen if a Rapture-like event (inscrutably mysterious and secular, with non-Christians and bad eggs just as likely to have disappeared as Rapture-believers) occurred causing millions to just suddenly disappear from the world? The story takes place two years after the event and follows a ‘typical' suburban family through the aftermath.

Perrotta excels at developing multiple characters and propelling a story through those characters' alternating takes on the narrative. The characters in The Leftovers are nuanced and believable, while being sympathetic. The Garvey family and those in their near orbit are real enough that their mistakes are both cringe-worthy and horrifying, and their suffering palpable.

The plot bogs down slightly in a couple of places late in the book, but was otherwise a page turner (or rather button pusher). The Leftovers is both an entertaining read and, at a deeper level, a remarkably unsettling story. While the mass disappearance that propels The Leftovers doesn't engender easy parallels with the real world, I found the widespread breakdown of both society and individuals disturbingly familiar.

What would you do if the people you love just disappeared?

We've all lost loved ones through the dissolution of relationships and through death, but what if someone close to you just vanished into thin air? If someone you cared for, who cared for you, just vaporized, and you have no way to answer where they are or why they left?

What would happen to your community, your town, your country, if this vanishing, this disappearance happened on a grand scale? If millions of people around the world just vanished one day, with no pattern or reason as to why one person disappeared and why another was left behind? How would that change the way you thought about yourself, about life, about the world in which you live?

People often make fun of me because of my fear of revolving doors — I've mostly resolved that phobia now — but the fear didn't come from the door itself, but because revolving doors have one characteristic that makes me uncomfortable: they don't close.

There's something about closure that makes things easier to cope with, to understand, to process. A door that closes has finality; losing someone to death or divorce also has a similar sense of end. A lack of closure is unsettling, unnerving, difficult.

Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers is ostensibly a novel about society after millions of people just vanish, but really, it is a story about closure. It is a book that looks at how various people deal with the loss of their loved ones, a loss without closure, without reason, without explanation. It is a story that grapples with loss, coping, rebuilding, self-doubt, and an acceptance of futility.

The characters in The Leftovers are all struggling with closure, and they all face that struggle in a different way. Everyone has nagging questions, and none of those questions get answered. Perrotta's prose isn't poetry, and the story is sometimes plodding, but the internal conflict of every character is poignant and resonant. The Leftovers appeals to us because it is relatable; it is a struggle we have all known, and the novel captures it well.

There is only a hint of closure at the end of the book, which is apt: Perrotta reminds us that there are always questions, there is always doubt. Not every question can be answered, and that's unsettling, but that's okay.

(Full review on I Tell Stories.)

Nice novel and interesting version of apocalyptic literature. In this case the apocalyptic event is an instantaneous disappearing that leaves nothing to battle against but the loss itself. The novel is the stories of how various people in a small town cope with the sudden disappearances of a whole set of people from their lives. Sudden, arbitrary and unexplainable loss of parts of a community force people to wrestle with how to go on with their lives and question whether the life they are living is what they really want.