The Leftovers

According to Christian belief, one day there will be a Rapture, and all the good people will be taken away to heaven, leaving the rest of us slobs to live for a certain number of years before the world ends. This has been the subject of many works of literature, from The Book of Revelation to the Left Behind series. Tom Perrotta has given his distinctive stamp to the idea: what happens to the left behind in the first part of the twenty-first century in suburban New Jersey?

Perrotta, a chronicler of suburban life in novels like Election and Little Children, has once again set his novel in a leafy suburb (I think it's New Jersey). The action begins right after the Rapture, although no one can agree that is a rapture, because a surprisingly eclectic group disappeared: "As far as anyone could tell, it was a random harvest, and the one thing the Rapture couldn't be was random. The whole point was to separate the wheat from the chaff, to reward the true believers and put the rest of the world on notice. An indiscriminate Rapture was no Rapture at all." Millions have disappeared from the face of the Earth, without leaving a trace.

Perrotta is amusingly specific: "Depending upon your viewing habits, you could listen to experts debating the validity of conflicting religious and scientific explanations for what was either a miracle or a tragedy, or watch an endless series of gauzy montages celebrating the lives of departed celebrities--John Mellencamp and Jennifer Lopez, Shaq and Adam Sandler, Miss Texas and Greta Van Susteren, Vladimir Putin and the Pope."

The book focuses on several characters, all linked to the one town. Kevin Garvey, businessman and mayor, lost no one in the Rapture, but his wife has joined a cult called the Guilty Remnant, who wear all white, take a vow of silence, and smoke cigarettes. They have accepted that time is running out, and pester others by watching them silently to remind them of it: "The G.R. wasn't big on spelling out its creed; it had no priests or ministers, no scripture, and no formal system of instruction. It was a lifestyle, not a religion, an ongoing improvisation rooted in the conviction that the post-Rapture world demanded a new way of living, free from the old, discredited forms--no more marriage, no more families, no more consumerism, no more politics, no more conventional religion, no more mindless entertainment. Those days were done. All that remained for humanity was to hunker down and await the inevitable."

What's so striking is how life goes on pretty much the same for most. Kevin tries to keep watch over his teenage daughter, Jill, who has shaved her head and starts ditching classes, influenced by her friend Aimee, who has moved into the house. Kevin's son Tom left college to follow another religion, the Holy Wayners, who was founded by a man who started giving consolation hugs to people and ended up running an empire. Wayne gets busted for sexual abusing teenage girls (Asians are his preference) in the hope of siring a messiah, and Tom ends up escorting the pregnant sixteen-year-old, Christine, to the designated birthing home.

Meanwhile Nora Durst, who lost her husband and two children in the "Sudden Departure," obsessively watches Spongebob Squarepants and is the lingering object of pity. She tries to start again by striking up a relationship with Kevin, who misses his wife but is not above moving on himself.

The Leftovers has an overarching theme of loss and grief, but is also piquantly funny about the mores of suburban life. In a way, one can compare what the left behind are going through to the attitudes of post-9/11, but on a much grander scale, and that there is no villain involved. What would you do if, in an instant, millions of people, inevitably including people you knew, disappeared,? Perrotta gets it right, I think. You would either join a crazy cult or do absolutely nothing.

And then there are the right-on portraits of the minutiae of suburban American life, such as the family holiday dinner: "She was relieved to hear that there might not be a turkey at Christmas dinner. Karen had made a big one for Thanksgiving, and the whole family had gathered around it for what felt like an excruciating length of time, rhapsodizing about its golden brown skin and moist interior. What a beautiful bird, they kept telling one another, which was a weird thing to say about a dead thing without a head. And then her cousin Jerry had made everyone pose for a group photograph, with the beautiful bird occupying the place of honor. At least nobody would do that with roast beef."