The Leftovers

I find everything that Tom Perrotta writes to be about as readable as books get. The downside is that I find them as forgettable as I find them readable.
In more recent novels his characters and plots are becoming more memorable. In The Leftovers Perrotta's growth in these areas is almost irrelevant because of the absolute brilliance of the premise at the heart of his novel: an inexplicable rapture (rupture?) that undermines and destabilizes ordinary lives. It so cleverly and monolithically stands in for the many existential black holes that are repressed in our lives, principally death and in particular the deaths of those we love. For some in the book nothing helps. For others time, reconnection, routine help. Mostly though, in The show more Leftovers, there is an overall sense of diminishment, that "though much is taken", not so "much abides". show less

Tom Perrotta writes about ordinary people, living ordinary lives in suburbia. In his previous books, he’s told the tale of young suburban parents falling into an extra-marital affair (“Little Children”), of a New Jersey student who goes to Yale and learns how to integrate his persona as the son of a lunch-truck driver with that of an Ivy League student (“Joe College”), and of a high school sex-ed teacher whose career is jeopardized after admitting to her students that people may engage in oral sex because they like it (“The Abstinence Teacher”). Even the central dramatic events in these (very good) books are, well, ordinary.

“The Leftovers” is different. While it’s again about ordinary people living in suburbia, the show more novel takes place after a most extraordinary event: the “Sudden Disappearance” in which millions of people around the world have vanished. It’s a rapture-like event, except that unlike the rapture, the people in Perrott’s book just literally disappear rather than flying into the sky, and unlike the rapture, there appears to be no rhyme or reason to which people disappear. Those who do include “Hindus and Buddhists and Muslims and Jews and atheists and animists and homosexuals and Eskimos and Mormans and Zoroastrians”, as well as a whole bunch celebrities: “John Mellencamp and Jennifer Lopez, Shaq and Adam Sandler, Miss Texas and Greta Van Susteren, Vladimiar Putin and the Pope.” The Sudden Disappearance happens on Oct. 14, and the multiple references to “Oct. 14” are clearly intended to recall Sept. 11, and the thousands who suddenly disappeared that fateful day.

Perrotta’s novel begins three years after the Sudden Disappearance and focuses on the residents of the Mapleton who were left behind—the leftovers. They’ve responded in two ways. Some, like Kevin Garvey, have tried to regain the ordinary lives they led prior to Oct. 14, doing things like running for mayor and joining a softball team, while others, like Kevin’s wife Laurie, adopt extreme and unusual behaviors. Laurie, for example, joins the G.R.—the Guilty Remnants—a cult who members wear white, refuse to speak, and wander around town smoking cigarettes and staring at—“watching”—people outside the G.R. Another cult eschews baths and shoes—allowing just the slight leniency of flip-flops when there’s snow on the ground—while a third gathers around a prophet who offers healing hugs, but also turns out to have a penchant for impregnating underage girls. And then there’s the Rev. Matt Jamison, who is so disappointed that he has been left behind that he makes it his personal mission to out all the infidelities and petty crimes of those who have disappeared.

Perrotta makes clear that both types of response to an event like Oct. 14 (and thus, Sept. 11?) are fraught with problems. The craziness of the cults is evident, but so is the craziness of trying to resume an ordinary life: to do so is to behave in ways that can’t be anything but absurd. Here is Perrotta describing a Thanksgiving dinner: “What a beautiful bird, they kept telling one another, which was a weird things to say about a dead thing without a head. And then . . .cousin Jerry had made everyone post for a group photograph, with the beautiful bird occupying the place of honor.” And here, he depicts an announcement at the City Council Meeting: “Congratulations to Brownie Troop 173, whose second annual gingerbread cookie fund-raiser netted over three hundred dollars for Fuzzy Amigos International, a charity that sends stuffed animals to impoverished indigenous children in Ecuador, Boliva, and Peru”. What would pass without comment during a normal time becomes downright ludicrous when huge numbers of people have just evaporated.

And yet, the book’s ending makes clear Perrotta’s real belief about how we must respond to tragedy. After an unexpected revelation about the G.R. that wallops the reader, there is a further tidying of loose ends that leaves one with hope about the future of those characters who have determined that they will go on living their ordinary lives. show less

i completely understand the section of people who hate open endings of this magnitude but i just eat them up every time. i LOVE and live for the gaps authors leave for me to sit around and think about what they could be filled with. i love the acceptance that i'll never know for sure. i read this after watching the show, so it was fascinating to see the changes the showrunners made from the original story and especially what they ended up leaving behind altogether (justice for jill's shaved head and the GR members at the outpost who fell in love). meg and laurie's storyline had so much life here, i got the time with jill and tom that i desperately wanted, and everyone was just so real. they're messy and fucked up and make the wrong show more decisions and act out in pain/anger and there aren't resolutions and they don't have time to fix mistakes and they're just dragging themselves through every day full of grief and confusion and i just love them for it!!!!!!!!!! show less

I like the premise: The Rapture happens - but rather than it being all the zealous Christians who are taken, it's a random selection of people - all types, all ages.

Perrotta is also a good writer - his characters seem real and believable, and I found myself caring about them, even when they weren't doing much.

Which is good, because for a lot of the book, they weren't really doing much. The book isn't very plot-driven, it's more of an exploration of the various forms of grief that manifest when people lose their loved ones, and experience existential crises of faith. My criticism of it is that it doesn't really do enough to distinguish this "Rapture" from other times when many people have been lost. In Perrotta's scenario, I'd say that show more maybe a little less than 5% of the population disappears - enough that pretty much everyone knows someone who was "taken," but not enough to bring society to a standstill. War and plague have actually disrupted societies far more. And Perrotta does acknowledge that many, if not most people, just get over it and go on with their daily routines - it's just that the book focuses on those who let the mysterious event be the pick that begins to unravel their lives. show less

This book isn't quite was I was expecting. I was anticipating it having more of an immediately post-Rapture plot but it doesn't - most of this happens three years afterwards. It did seem to me to be a bit of a long wait between the event and people acting out from their grief, but I still found the book was massively engaging. It's really more of a character study, watching how each member of a family group (plus one) deals with the losses they've experienced. Grief, if done well, interests me (perhaps because of the somewhat higher than average number of family deaths I dealt with when I was young). This grief is done very well and I could barely put the book down. The characters don't always make logical choices or even smart ones, show more but it was fascinating to watch the paths they choose to take and why. I didn't particularly care for many/any of the characters (especially the males' tendency to be attracted to teenage/underage girls - totally could have done without that) but I was still very into the book and could barely put it down - I finished this book the same day I started it. show less

In the trainwreck of 2020, aspects of Tom Perotta’s The Leftovers feel eerily familiar as people struggle to find a new normal after part of the world’s population disappear without an explanation. Short chapters follow a handful of characters including a small-town mayor, his unhappy wife, and their two teenage children as they deal with their different outlooks and reactions to the Sudden Departure. Perotta does a great job finding the awkwardness in the aftermath, and the humor amidst the loss, but some of his characters fall a bit flat--especially the women. Nonetheless, an interesting read about loss, connections, and moving on that feels timely during COVID-19.

It’s March. We are a quarter of the way through the year and already I have found a book that I believe is a serious contender for my book of the year.

The Leftovers takes place three years after an event known as the Rapture by some, and the Sudden Departure by many. Basically, 2% of the earth’s population just disappeared in a split second. The monumental event, whatever it was, did not discriminate across gender, sexual, religious, colour or race lines. Set in the fictional town of Mapleton, New York, this novel examines the effect the Sudden Departure has had on the residents, focusing mainly on the Garvey family – father Kevin, the town mayor, who tries to maintain a positive outlook and a sense of normalcy; wife Laurie, who show more has left the family to join a cult known as the Guilty Remnant; daughter Jill, who is rebelling as a form of coping with seeing her oldest friend disappear; and son Tom, who put his faith in a man who calls himself Holy Wayne and who believes he has the power to absorb other people’s pain.

A lot of the events in the book could be described as mundane, in that it is people just trying to live their lives, coping with loss, not knowing what happened or why, and searching for ways to get through the pain and confusion. It does make you think ‘what if’, but what I loved about it was the fact that although the Sudden Departure itself is implausible, the reactions of the townsfolk to it do seem entirely believable. I wouldn’t class it necessarily as dystopia, and definitely not as sci-fi, but perhaps alternative reality. A reality that I personally would not want to contemplate!

Lives go off on their own trajectories, and people react in different ways. I loved reading about the residents of this small town, and I only wish there was a sequel. Incidentally, I tried watching the TV adaptation before I even knew that it was based on a book, and while the premise fascinated me, I couldn’t get past two episodes before giving up. The second long flashbacks annoyed me and there seemed to be too many storylines going on, but in the book the storylines all meld together perfectly.

Highly, highly recommended. show less