Life goes on after a global disaster … or does it?

While a lot of readers have used the word “subtle” to describe Perrotta’s book, I think it is a bit too kind. Yes, The Leftovers has an intriguing plot—the world has undergone a “Rapture” of a sorts, with millions of men, women and children, even babies, suddenly disappearing in front of their families, friends, in classrooms, at the workplace, driving their cars, taking showers, and leaving no clue as to what happened to them. The real story is what happens to those left behind, or the “leftovers.” If a religious phenomenon, the question is whether the leftovers were rejected as unworthy, or were they the chosen ones left behind to carry on. If an unexplained scientific phenomenon, why were some “disappeared” and not others.

We are given Mapleton, a suburban town still afflicted with a combination of lingering grief and blank puzzlement three years later, its inhabitants trying to live their lives while those lives crumble at the edges in the aftermath of the Sudden Departure, as the disappearances are dubbed in the book. Take 9-11, and multiply it a thousand-fold and you’ll get the idea…sort of. But where are the profound insights? Where is the self-examination? Where are the theories? Instead of change, progress, transformation in the wake of disaster, there is stagnation, entropy, dissolution. Rather depressing!

The family of Mayor Garvey takes front and center. The mayor is the champion of a “return to normalcy,” while his son leaves college and joins a cult that starts out claiming to hug leftovers back to emotional health and which ultimately turns into a stereotype, with the leader taking teen wives and encouraging orgies, while awaiting the birth of a prophet to make sense of it all. Garvey’s wife joins another cult that calls itself the Guilty Remnant and denounces the concept of a return to normalcy. Its members stalk “non-believers,” brandish cigarettes, wear only white, abandon speech, and give up family and all material wealth in anticipation of the Apocalypse. We are given glimpses that the GR movement is more insidious than it appears, and Perrota lets this get under our skin without taking it much further. The author is at his most effective in conveying his horror of cults and the twisted hypocrisy of evangelical fundamentalists.

So what are we, the reader, to make of all this? Well, Perrotta certainly raises enough questions about global disaster, religious faith, marriage, parent/child relationships, and more to keep us up at night, and I guess that’s something. I was especially disturbed by the lack of passion in most of his characters; there was a dragging emotionally-dead quality to their dialogue and their actions which, perhaps, was precisely Perrotta’s point. Still and all, I ended the book with a lingering frustration that the author hadn’t gone deeper in plumbing the depths of his story.