Tom Perrotta is one of the more interesting satirists of contemporary American society. A number of his novels have been turned in to films, too, the most successful was ELECTION, with Reese Witherspoon as a aggressive high school leader, who ends up sleeping with her English teacher, Matthew Broderick.
In THE LEFTOVERS, Perrotta skewers contemporary religious belief, as the Rapture has taken place (so some say), and millions of people, good and bad, even the Pope disappear overnight. Those who remain wonder what they did wrong to not be included in the elect. Anyways, that's the setting for the novel which takes place in Mapleton, a typical small American town, where the Mayor, Kevin Garvey, tries to make sense of things and live his life. Although his family is not directly touched by the Rapture, his son goes off to college after the Rapture and ends up joining a cult called the Holy Wayne's, following a Prophet, a fraud of course, who ends up sleeping with his teen age followers. Kevin's daughter, Jill, feels lost and friendless, ends up friends with the fast and loose Aimee. They spend their days skipping school, taking drugs, and playing a version of spin the bottle, except that instead of a kiss, they pair off in bedrooms. Finally, Kevin's wife, ends up leaving both her children and husband to joins the Guilty Remnant, a group of crazies devoted to being 'the next group to be saved.' They dress in all white, smoke cigarettes, and go around harassing the rest of the population of Mapleton. By staring at them in silence, they remind the leftovers that they are sinners, and to be saved, they must, like the Guilty Remnant, give up their evil ways and devote their lives to the group. It is only through penance and suffering that one can be saved. Sound familiar.
Needless to say, Kevin's life has fallen apart, an unintended consequence of the Rapture, and he tries to make the best of it, hoping against hope that his wife will eventually return. She doesn't as she develops a very close relationship with Meg, a fellow HR, who left her fiancee on the altar to join the group. Their relationship ends when the group decides that Meg must become a martyr to the cause and must willing be killed by her best friend Laurie, Kevin's wife. Meanwhile, Kevin's son Tom discovers that Holy Wayne is a fraud, that the young woman Wayne has impregnated with his heir, has a daughter rather than a son. She ends up abandoning the baby, leaving Tom with the child. He returns home, leaves the child on his father's doorstep, and takes off to find the mother of Wayne's baby, who has run off with a group of hippies called the Barefoot Kids. Following this?
Kevin, longing for his family, the way it was, tries his best to survive and falls for Nora, a woman who lost her entire family in the Rapture. She struggles to live with this loss, and though she tries various scenarios, she fails and decides to end her relationship with Tom. She does this by letter, which she hand delivers to his home. When she arrives to drop off the letter, the finds the baby left by Tom's son. Tom returns home, after discovering his daughter's friend, Aime, who has been living with them(and who he lusts after), has moved out. When he arrives home, Nora is standing at his door, smiling with the baby in her arms. The novel ends.
I did not love the book but laughed quite a bit, especially at the antics of various crazies, both Christian and pagan, in the novel who believe almost anything. No one is immune from Perrotta's satire. How we might react to a catastrophe of this strangeness is the theme of the novel and few come off well. Kevin is perhaps the most admirable, wanting what he has lost, a wife and family, striving to make the best of a terrible situation, seeking love, by caring, by trying to understand, following a moral compass that gives him some stability. He's the only one in the novel who has not been changed by the Rapture; every one else seems have gone through a metamorphosis for the worst. The only answer to tragedy is to remain human and empathetic.
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