The Leftovers

Laurie Garvey hadn’t been raised to believe in the Rapture. She hadn’t been raised to believe in much of anything, except the foolishness of belief itself.

We’re agnosticsWe don’t know if there’s a God, and nobody else does, either. They might say they do, but they really don’t.

The first time she heard about the Rapture, she was a freshman in college, taking a class called Intro to World Religions. The phenomenon the professor described seemed like a joke to her, hordes of Christians floating out of their clothes, rising up through the roofs of their houses and cars to meet Jesus in the sky, everyone else standing around with their mouths hanging open, wondering where all the good people had gone. The theology remained murky to her, even after she read the section on “Premillennial Dispensationalism” in her textbook, all that mumbo jumbo about Armageddon and the Apocalypse. It felt like religious kitsch, as tacky as a black velvet painting, the kind of fantasy that appealed to people who ate too much fried food, spanked their kids, and had no problem with the theory that their loving God invented AIDS to punish the gays. Every once in awhile, in the years that followed, she’d spot someone reading one of the Left Behind books in an airport or on a train, and feel a twinge of pity, and even a little bit of tenderness, for the poor sucker who had nothing better to read, and nothing else to do, except sit around dreaming about the end of the world.

And then it happened. The biblical prophecy came true, or at least party true. People disappeared, millions of them at the same time, all over the world.

The Leftovers is Tom Perrotta’s novel about those who are left behind when The Rapture comes, about the many ways that they are broken and damaged when left behind. The Garvey family is in the center of the novel, though they are not as directly affected as many others, because no one in their family was taken. But the toll taken on their town affects them deeply and personally.

Laurie Garvey, wife of Kevin, mother of Tom and Jill, starts out coping fairly well. Watching her best friend, Rosalie, slowly break down over the period of two years about the loss of her daughter, about not knowing where her daughter has gone, not knowing why she was taken while others were not, eventually tears into Laurie’s concept of meaning and truth, and they end up joining ‘The Guilty Remnant’, a group dedicated to witnessing those left behind, and hoping to coax them to live a better life, so that they might be taken to Heaven when the years of tribulation come to an end. They take a vow of silence, live on two very small meals a day, sleep on the floor in crowded rooms, wear only white, and smoke cigarettes as a symbol of their faith. She misses her family dearly, but cannot bring herself to give up the only meaning she has been able to find in a world turned upside down.

Kevin Garvey was elected mayor after the prior mayor went crazy and tried to burn his own house down. He takes his job seriously, a job that he sees mainly as giving people constructive outlets for their pain and confusion, to keep them from burning down their houses, getting in fistfights, killing each other, killing themselves. He likes the job, but he misses his wife, and he is at a loss over what to do to help his children.

Tom Garvey was a few months into his Freshman year of college at the time of the Rapture. He had just started feeling free of the confines of life at home, and was beginning to enjoy girls, drinking, and even his classes. After The Rapture, however, he finds that he is obsessed with those taken away, even (or perhaps especially) those people that he hasn’t seen in years. He and a friend find themselves joining the Healing Hug movement, led by Holy Wayne, a leader who can take your pain from you in his embrace. Of course, Holy Wayne’s power goes to his head, he decides that he wants another child to replace the one he lost in the rapture, and because his wife cannot give him another, he starts looking for young, nubile women (some are underage by several years) to give him another child.

Jill Garvey is still in High School. She’s always been a good kid, but now the rules seem to have changed all around her, and she doesn’t know where she fits in anymore. She stops worrying much about her grades, starts hanging around with a new friend, Aimee, who moves in with Jill and Kevin to escape the lecherous way of her stepfather, now that her mother has been Raptured and isn’t there to protect her. Aimee prefers to get stoned rather than go to class, and to go to parties late every night, having sex and drinking and generally having a good old time. Jill watches herself following Aimee’s lead, and she wishes desperately that her mother were there to help her, to stop her from behaving this way, to give her guidance and comfort where Kevin is unable.

Everyone in this story is broken in one way or another. The pain of being left behind, of not knowing the meaning of a so-called Rapture that doesn’t follow any of the rules. Those taken are a wide cross-section of Earth’s population. Not only Christians, but also Jews, Muslims, atheists, Hindus, everyone. Not only good and honest people, but thieves, adulterers…everyone. Those left behind are likewise diverse and complicated.

I liked this story a lot. It was well told, and not entirely without hope. Tom Perrotta does a wonderful job of fleshing out his characters, and while you may never agree with their actions, or even their motives, you do understand how they get from point a to point b, and even sympathize.