The Leftovers

The Leftovers by Tom Perotta

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I came to this book after watching a couple of episodes of the HBO series. As is my wont, I was looking for some insight into the backstory and explanation for the television series. It is always interesting to see how television writers mutate the book's storylines for incomprehensible reasons.

The book starts three years after the “Sudden Disappearance,” when some small but unspecified number of people in the world's population disappeared from existence in a split second. The disappearances seem to have been entirely random, with some clusters in families, and other families unaffected. The Sudden Disappearance (“SD”) resembles the Rapture invented in the late 19th century by a small Protestant sect which has become a late-arising, outsized doctrine among certain Evangelical sects.

So, naturally, the book is mostly focused on the “religious” implications of the SD, ignoring the fact that most Christian churches, including Catholicism, do not have a doctrine of the Rapture. The author insists on treating the SD as a kind of challenge to mainline Christianity in a kind of wooden, 21st-century atheist way. Thus, we get a picture of people losing faith in Christianity, while taking up oddball cults and fads.

We are explicitly told through a minor, minor character - Rev. Jameson, who gets a bigger role in the television show and is turned into the brother of Norah Durst - that many of the people taken in the SD were sinners. So, we know it was not the Rapture UNLESS God is really a Calvinist, in which case, the Presbyterians should be increasing their market share.

The author's conventional bias against religion is unfortunate. The real challenge of an SD would be to the scientific worldview. The SD is outside the scope of science as we can possibly conceive it. Worse still, if it is a scientific phenomenon, when is it going to happen again? How would the SD affect science? Would people still have “faith” in science? What answers would science propose? Would people start believing in occult power or dark Lovecraftian entities?

We don't know because the book is not really interested in the SD except as a plot device to shake up the ant colony. No one speculates about what happened. We hear nothing about a scientific explanation or what the government is saying or doing.

What we get are several storylines that focus on average people living their average lives. Thus, we have Kevin, a successful businessman turned mayor of Mapleton. His wife, Laurie, has abandoned the family to join the Guilty Remnants (the “GR”), a cult that does not want people to forget the SD. His daughter Jill has allowed her grades to drop since Laurie abandoned the family and she has gotten into questionable sexual activities. His son, Tom, has joined the mission of the Holy Wayne, the proponent of the Holy Hug. Wayne is a typical religious scam artist/cultist with a taste for minor Asian girls. Tom has his doubts about Wayne but is shepherding Holy Wayne's pregnant fourth wife around America as a result of Wayne being arrested on the usual fare for which religious shysters generally get arrested. Then there is Norah Durst, who lost her entire family in the SD and has never recovered.

The book relates how these lives, situated in their own context, play out over the course of the fourth year after the SD.

This book makes no effort to solve the mystery of the SD. For the most part, although there are constant call-backs to the SD, such that it is a fact in the lives of most people, it is simply a fact like 9/11 or the Civil War: People disappeared and their families, friends, and associates have to deal with the sadness or inconvenience of losing a child or a teammate on a softball team.

The book really doesn't go anyplace, until the last pages. For example, Kevin has lost Laurie. Will she come back? Will he get involved with Norah? The answer is, initially, no and, then, maybe in the last lines of the book after an incredibly improbable set of events connects Holy Wayne to his 4th wife to Tom to Norah at the last minute to provide the one moment of light in a generally somber story.

Likewise, at the last minute, we learn how evil the GR really is, which we probably could have guessed from their nihilistic, prevent-anyone-from-enjoying-themselves ministry.

I approached this in the vein of a science fiction story because of the science fiction/paranormal premise. I wanted to see some speculation about the effects of a crypto-rapture on society. The only place where there was some imagination about that subject in the book involved the various new religious movements that were mentioned. Thus, the Holy Wayne cult was a typical cult with a charismatic leader. People were shown as being drawn to Wayne because they were depressed after the SD with its unexplained losses of friends and family members. Anyone who lived through the gut-punch of 9/11 knows that feeling (and, yet, there was not a rise in cult religion.) The Barefoot People were another variation. They were imagined as basically 1960s hippies looking for hedonism in what seemed to be an increasingly nihilistic culture.

The GR was really the author's best offering in terms of imagination and speculation. They were weird with their vow of silence and chain-smoking. None of it was explained, but Perotta generated a sense of nihilism in his scenes with them, but he didn't offer an explanation about what attracted any particular person to them. Typically, cults generate a sense of belonging, and we see some of that in the approach of Ms. Maffey to Jill, but we are also told that the GR actively opposes cult members from getting familiar with each other (except when they do, the GR moves to death cult mode.) Sociologically, the GR makes no sense, but there is an interesting story to be told about the nihilistic group that controls the GR and what their agenda is.

Honestly, I think that there was a much more interesting story to be told concerning Laurie's life after the last pages of the book.

In sum, this is a character-driven story. It is not plot-driven. If you want a plot and answers, this is not your story. If you want to read about characters, then it might be. For myself, I think that it was just beginning to find its footing when it ended.