The Leftovers ~ Tom Perrotta

Tom Perrotta delivers a troubling story about how ordinary people react to extraordinary and inexplicable events, the power of family to hurt and to heal, and the ease with which faith can slide into fanaticism.

The Garvey family — Kevin, Laurie and their two children, Tom and Jill — are the Mapleton residents at the centre of Perrotta’s novel, which opens three years after a Rapture-like event has whisked millions of people off the face of the earth. Just how many millions Perrotta doesn’t specify, but the phones still work and Starbucks still dispenses coffee by the grande. Nor do all (or even most) of the missing qualify as Camping-style Christians; those raptured away include Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews and the odd    alcoholic.

The Sudden Departure, which occurred one October 14, is never made remotely real — we’re told that various children and spouses just abruptly vanished into thin air — and laborious and unconvincing analogies to 9/11 are repeatedly hurled at the reader. We’re told that “the economy had gone into a tailspin after October 14th, with the stock market plunging and consumer spending falling off a cliff” and that makeshift memorials and missing-persons notices sprang up everywhere”.

The rapture’s failure to conform to biblical prophecy has driven some people over the edge. The Rev. Matt Jamison becomes chief among the rapture deniers of the remaining Mapleton population: “He wept frequently and kept up a running monologue about . . . how unfair it was that he’d missed the cut.” The minister’s response to this unfairness is to insist this wasn’t the real rapture, and to prove it with a newsletter full of scurrilous tittle-tattle about the disappeared.

 

Other survivors go over the edge in different ways. The Barefoot People (young Tom Garvey eventually becomes one) believe the proper response to the mass disappearances is to party down pretty much 24/7. There’s a Healing Hug movement, led by a guru named Holy Wayne whom Perrotta memorably characterizes as “that age-old scoundrel, the Horny Man of God.” The Huggers are  waiting for one of Holy Wayne’s teenage “brides” to deliver the “miracle child” who will, presumably, usher in a new age of cosmic grooviness.

Far more sinister is a martyrdom-seeking cult called the Guilty Remnant. Members must take a vow of silence, wear white and brandish lighted cigarettes every time they appear in public. “We Smoke to Proclaim Our Faith,” goes their mantra. The main jobs of Guilty Remnant members are to “watch” non-members — that is, stalk them — and to garner new devotees and wait for the end of the world. Laurie Garvey drifts somewhat aimlessly into this cult and then becomes subsumed by it. As “The Leftovers” winds to its almost foregone conclusion, the dismayed reader learns that smoking is the least ominous    sacrament practiced by her new soul mates.

Yet the novel isn’t completely bleak. In fact, we come to care about the characters deeply. Perrotta cuts quickly and cinematically between these story lines, deftly building tension as he immerses us in the characters’ daily lives and the ways that people deal with what they can’t understand.

Di