We have all had an experience with death. Be it our beloveds, best friends and parents, or our acquaintances, cousins and coworkers, we've all tasted the bitterness of loss, waking the morning after only to be hit by the knowledge that there is now a hole in our lives that was not there 24 hours earlier. For the most part, this loss is manageable, a fact of life that must be accepted. But what if this wasn't so? What if those we loved, those we worked with, those we greeted on our way to work just disappeared without a trace, without explanation? What if we are left behind?
Mr. Perrotta, a writer of popular fiction, cleverly and keenly imagines, in The Leftovers, a world in which the Rapture, or something like it, comes to Earth and removes a substantial portion of the human population. The old and the young, the popular and the freakish, the straight and the gay all experience disappearances, leaving those who were not taken on that fateful day to grieve, to rage, and finally to wonder at the rhyme and the reason of it all. The cross-section of the vanished is so thorough that sinfulness does not appear to have been a factor. Nonetheless, they are gone, abandoning the rest to persist in a world rejected by god.
Though many quickly adjust to the shock, losing only acquaintances and allies, others are tormented by the loss of husbands and children. And though some take comfort in the knowledge that the disappeared have been chosen for some purpose; others find that this solace is more than overcome by confusion and despair that accompanies the knowledge that they themselves were not chosen, were deemed not worthy. Though the former are mostly successful in their efforts to piece their lives back together, the latter struggle so mightily that many of them turn to the Guilty Remnant, a religious order that has sworn to silently remind the rest of humanity of that fateful day and the deficiencies that have clearly kept them from being delivered along with the disappeared.
The story follows the lives of the Garvey family. The father, Kevin, is the mayor of a small town in the American Northeast who is trying to raise his teenaged daughter on his own now that his wife, Laurie, has left them for the Guilty Remnant. But no amount of sympathetic understanding from her father can keep Jill Garvey from rebellion. She has taken up with a new friend, Amy, a troubled teen who moved in with the Garveys after her mother's disappearance opened the door to her stepfather's abuse. And yet Jill's struggles to find her place dwarf her elder brother's collegiate flailings. Tom Garvey has dropped out of school and churned his way through religious cults and spiritual movements in an effort to find a meaning that may forever elude him. Together, Kevin and Laurie, Jill and Tom, expose us to a changed world, a world that struggles to heal itself in the wake of an event the Leftovers are ill-prepared to endure. But can this wound be healed, or is the world a tapestry ruined by having had sections of its soul excised?
Though Mr. Perrotta's plodding plot leaves something to be desired, and though his conclusion here lacks for explosiveness, The Leftovers is thoughtful work as dark as it is playful. There is a desire amongst certain segments of the population to obsess over the end times, to read portentousness into every possible pattern. Instead of castigating these obsessives, Mr. Perrotta makes an attempt to understand what life would be like for those not taken by the Rapture, what society might be like with part of its body amputated by god. His conclusion? Life goes on. As with every tragedy in our lives, and in the lives of those who came before us, we endure. For to do else is to waste the life we have been given, by god or by the universe. We grieve, we mourn and then we move on because that is what we do.
The Leftovers marries engaging characters with a thoughtful premise to create an entertaining end product. Yes, Mr. Perrotta belabors the point, coming within an eyelash of finding a dead horse to thrash, but this and a somewhat quiet conclusion are only meager stains on what is otherwise a pleasant and introspective read. (3/5 Stars)
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