The Leftovers

The Leftovers
By Tom Perrotta (355 pages)
Published by St. Martin's Press
Bookish rating: 4.25

This is my first Tom Perrotta novel, and I'm a fan. The Leftovers sort of satarizes a typical suburban family after a rapture-like event takes over the globe, in which people just vanish. Of course, it's not the real rapture, as a bunch of good Christians are left behind, scratching their heads. Nobody can explain it, oodles of cults pop up, and the world sort of kind of moves on. Or tries to.

So, we meet Kevin, the patriarch of his little family who later becomes mayor of Mapleton; mom-and-wife Laurie, who abandons her family to join a wacky cult; older child Tom, who drops out of college and joins the following of a questionable, self-proclaimed prophet with a penchant for child brides; and Jill, the straight-A student now struggling at school and doing charming things with guys in dorm-drama-like scenarios.

We also meet Kevin's love interest, who lost her entire family in the non-rapture. She's by far the msot interesting and heartbreaking character.

Perrotta has an amazing ability to sum up the complex, layered, and often ridiculous nuances of suburban family life--such as the mom who views each task in her day as grains of sand, taking up time, rushing her to uncomfortable efficiency, whether she's vacuuming or having sex, or a 4-year-old's insistence on drinking apple juice in a cup without a lid, letting her, and then going nutso with a touch of profanity when she inevitably spills it--and nobody makes a move to clean it up, assuming Mommy will do it. At the same time, the novel is most definitely comic, poking fun at suburbia with such tiny details as a mom exaggeratedly waving her hand in front of her face near a smoker.

This tension between satire and heart creates a fascinating result: a novel simultaneously deeply amusing, insightful, and utterly heartbreaking. I don't quite know how Perrotta did it--the writing is unlike anything I've come across in a long, long time---perhaps ever.

Highly recommended.