What I’ve Read: The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta
I don’t remember how I heard about this book, but I had added it to my library queue (I often add books to my library queue haphazardly and on a whim). Last night, during a particularly ridiculous bout of insomnia, I grabbed a cup of tea and settled in to read. Several hours later, I turned the last page. Maybe I was slightly delirious from lack of sleep (it’s been a rough couple of weeks), but this book knocked my socks off. Good til the last drop.
The Leftovers is the story of the people left behind after a Rapture-like event occurred on earth. It’s not weirdly religious like the Left Behind series, but is instead just about regular people coping with loss and confusion in different ways. The story centers around the small town of Mapleton, and zeroes in from there on a few families in particular. In one tragic example, a Mapleton woman lost her two small children and her husband in what becomes known as the Sudden Departure. In response to these events, she slides into a Spongebob Squarepants obsession, insisting on watching every episode and then journaling about it afterward in an attempt to feel closer to her lost children.
It could have been a more pointed book, taking on the American response to loss, how the world continues with massive holes in the pop culture world (Jennifer Lopez disappears in the Sudden Departure, by the way), how religion plays into the entire thing. Instead, the book just shows how these ordinary people decide to respond to what happened in ways that you or me may find strangely recognizable.
It’s not a haunting book in the way that some other loss-related or post-apocalyptic novels are, but it has stuck with me in a way that a book hasn’t in quite some time. I keep imagining myself in their place, wondering how I’d react. What I would do. While I appreciated that Perrotta mostly kept spiraling emotion out of the text, I see some other reviewers disagree with me and wish there had been more emotions in play.
Have you read this book? What did you think?
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