My rating: 3 of 5 stars
What if you were going about your day, a day like any other, when the Rapture happened?
Bookshelves: popular-fiction, suburbia, satire, religion-sort-of, what-is-it-all-for-anyway, literary-fiction, multiple-povs, end-of-the-world, love-the-cover
The Leftovers is the story of those left behind after what is officially called the Sudden Departure, for the purposes of PC and especially looking at who was taken and who was left behind and the fact that Jesus does not seem to have made an actual appearance. And it’s a lot to deal with. It’s more than a little disconcerting when the friend beside you on the sofa watching YouTube videos is just not there. Just gone. Vanished. In, literally, the blink of an eye.
So, how to deal? If you didn’t lose your own spouse or child or parent or sibling, then you know plenty of people who did, or, perhaps most traumatically, you were an actual Eyewitness. What do you do? Maybe you drown yourself in booze and weed and sex. Maybe you bury yourself in work, or you leave your spouse and children to join a wonky stalker-ish cult, or you drop out of school and follow a so-called messiah who collects a harem’s worth of child brides in an effort to father The One as quickly as possible. Maybe you hide away from the world in your shock and grief. Or maybe you get righteously pissed and start a poison-pen mimeograph-type crap newsletter that you hand out on street corners to blast everyone else you’re stuck here with, because why the hell would the Rapture take that Muslim and that brown person and that goddamn hommaseckshual, and leave you behind when everybody knows you’re the best Christian in the entire world and you should have been hand-picked and first.
Or maybe you realize some things cannot be made sense of so you pick up the pieces and keep living your life as best you can, however that happens to be.
Perrotta writes with humor and heart, and without straying into the overly Biblical or the mawkish. Thoroughly enjoyable read, recommended.
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99 Monkeys 