One of the many things I admire about Tom Perrotta's new book, The Leftovers, is its optimism. Its initial premise is far from optimistic: it begins with the idea that a large part of the human population just disappeared one day -- and an even larger part is left behind. "Left-over." The plot begins after the sudden disappearance. Very few in the book dare call this event The Rapture, because to do so would be to acknowledge that the Leftovers were not blessed, were individuals who had done something fundamentally wrong in their lives. As Perrotta's book says at the introduction: "'Something tragic occurred,' the experts repeated over and over. 'It was a Rapture-like phenomenon, but it doesn't appear to have been the Rapture.'" It goes on to say: "Interestingly, some of the loudest voices making this argument belonged to Christians themselves, who couldn't help noticing that many of the people who'd disappeared on October 14th--Hindus and Buddhists and Muslims and Jews and atheists and animists and homosexuals and Eskimos and Mormons and Zoroastrians, whatever the heck they were--hadn't accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior."
The book proceeds to create a world pretty much like the one we all live in right now, save for the fact that humanity must proceed under the cloud of feeling that they have missed the bus, so to speak, and have been left to proceed in a world without something to look forward to. Good friends, family members, mates and enemies had dematerialized, and in the wake of that, the remaining characters seek ways to deal with their feelings of inadequacy and loss. So some strikingly familiar groups emerge: The Barefoot People, for one, a bunch of Neo-Hippies who go around barefoot of course, avoiding baths and smoking marijuana, living communally or having huge parties with lots of sex, drugs and rock n' roll.
Notably, something sort of like this has already happened:
Similarly, a large group of people begin following a character called The Holy Wayne, a creepy Harold Campingish figure who gains followers because of his charismatic Healing Hug, but his popularity ultimately turns him into a perverted power monger. By the end of the book, he is put in jail for his transgressions, and his followers are left more adrift then they were at the beginning of the novel.
And the beginning of the novel is full of characters adrift. The one who sets the tone of the book is Laurie Garvey, a character raised with no beliefs to speak of. Pre-Disappearance, she finds meaning in her family and comfortable suburban existence, but after the daughter of one of her friends disappears, she begins to lose her grasp of whatever meaning her life had. Feeling her life has been a scam, she joins a very very creepy group called The Watchers, people who disavow every aspect of their previous life, who spook around town wearing white, smoke cigarettes, and stalk those citizens of the novel who dare to try to live a normal life in the Post-Rapture world. Including Laurie's husband Kevin, who is left alone with their daughter Jill and Jill's friend Aimee --
What I find most disturbingly authentic about the novel is portrayed through Jill, who is a late teen. She ends up engaged in drinking and meaningless sex, the very pursuits that I, as a college professor, have come to understand are already central to many of our college-aged youth today. Jill's loss of her mom to the Watchers is not all that different from the large number of young people I have met recently whose parents deserted their families for their own personal, often selfish pursuits, leaving their children to struggle with the superficiality and fragility of the illusion of a functioning family.
As I read this book and saw the parallels between the world we live in today, I even began to wonder if we might be able to say that we are all, already, Left-Overs. Perhaps the Rapture has already happened, or perhaps it is happening as we speak. I think of earthquakes and hurricanes and floods and illnesses that have occurred in recent years, taking away vast numbers of people in one fell swoop, or the plague of cancer that robs us regularly of our beloved, at younger ages and in more senseless ways, and I think: perhaps this is how The Rapture may work -- in very natural, biological ways, taking large numbers of people over a relatively short period of time, leaving the rest of us to deal with the responsibility attached with their loss.
Perhaps, too, in the cycle of life, even End Times come in cycles. If the end is, ultimately, loss and the adjustment that comes along with it, we have had countless Raptures over time -- countless potential End Times -- plagues and wars and other forms of loss -- that have left LeftOvers, real-life human individuals challenged to deal with the potential meaninglessness that accompanies great and excessive loss.
Faced with such intense loss, we could hang our hopes on False Saviors, be they religious or political, or we could seek to find, as I would dare to argue some of the characters in The Leftovers seek to find a humane and authentic way to live in the real world, and by finding a humane and authentic way to live in the real world, we might even create a new world, full of happiness for just being alive, and hope for a peaceful tomorrow.
The first time was while I was living in overseas.
It was a simple, clean robbery.
I knew exactly when it began,
and when it ended.
Someone broke the door of my apartment off of its hinges,
walked in, found where I had stored some cash and some gold jewelry that I had bought
as a gift for my mother.
They took it and left everything else in my apartment untouched.
It was as if they had read my mind on where this stuff was.
They didn't even take my computer -- they went for what they could sell,
or spend,
quickly.
Coming home to that was very disturbing, it's true, but once the door was fixed, I could get on with the process of mending from that invasion. My neighbors and friends helped me recuperate my loss, and my life went on.
