fancy terrible: book reviews by fancy ladies

What if—whoosh, right now, with no explanation—a number of us simply vanished?  Would some of us collapse? Would others of us go on, one foot in front of the other, as we did before the world turned upside down?

That’s what the bewildered citizens of Mapleton, who lost many of their neighbors, friends and lovers in the event known as the Sudden Departure, have to figure out. Because nothing has been the same since it happened—not marriages, not friendships, not even the relationships between parents and children.

With heart, intelligence and a rare ability to illuminate the struggles inherent in ordinary lives, Tom Perrotta has written a startling, thought-provoking novel about love, connection and loss.

 

Disclosure: I didn’t want to read The Leftovers because of the hype it was getting. I wanted to read this book because I’d read Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher and thought it was a waste of three days. But you know, I’m fair, I like to give authors a second shake. Full disclosure: This was loads better.

October 14. The day where people simply vanished. Many are quick to deem the vanishings as evidence of The Rapture; others (mostly religious types who were left behind) protest that it was not. Whatever the case, the Sudden Departure, as it comes to be called, forces people to deal with the unexplained losses of their family members and friends.

In Mapleton, the loss centers around the Garvey family: father Kevin, mother Laurie, daughter Jill, and son Tom. After the Sudden Departure, Tom runs off to join followers of a raving lunatic who claims he can absorb the pain of those left behind. Laurie joins the Guilty Remnant, a fringe group dedicated to shedding their previous lives and waiting vigilantly for the End of Days. Jill turns into a kind of rebel, skipping class and hanging out with a wild child. Kevin, meanwhile, is just trying to keep his family together while maintaining some semblance of order as mayor of Mapleton.

Let’s talk about the Guilty Remnant for a minute, because they wreck my head. Picture it: a group of people who have taken a vow of silence, dress in all white, smoke all the time (“We don’t smoke for enjoyment. We smoke to proclaim our faith.”), and perform surveillance — aka stalk — their neighbors. Their purpose is to remind everyone left behind that God is always watching. The thing is, it’s not as if many of the followers are religious; it just seems that a lot of them have lost their families and don’t know what to do with themselves. IIII KNOW, let’s cash in our chips and give all of our money to this organization so we can skulk around all day and do nothing. Weeeeeeeeeee!

Generally speaking, they were much more focused on God the Father, the jealous Old Testament deity who demanded blind obedience and tested the loyalty of his followers in cruelly inventive ways.

It had taken Laurie a long time to figure this out, and she still wasn’t sure if she’d gotten it right. The G.R. wasn’t big on spelling out its creed; it had no priests or minsters, no scripture, and no formal system of instruction. It was a lifestyle, not a religion, an ongoing inprovisation rooted in the conviction that the post-Ra[ptire world demanded a new way of living, free from the old, discredited forms — no more marriate, no more families,  no more consumerism, no more politics, no more conventional religion, no more mindless entertainment. Those days were done. All that remained for humanity was to hunker down and await the inevitable.

On Christmas, members of the G.R. are tasked with visiting their family members, in order to “disrupt the cozy rhythms and rituals of the holiday.” (How effing mean is that? If the world is going to end at some point in the near future, can you please just let me have Christmas???? Assholes.) Here, when Laurie and her G.R. partner, Meg, visit Kevin on Christmas Day, is one of the saddest moments in the book. The scene is just heartbreaking — Kevin and Laurie “reconnecting” but being unable to communicate fully, his being welcoming and feeding the women, her .  .  . wistfulness. You can almost feel her warming up in her old home, and while she doesn’t regret leaving, not really, it’s obviously hard to be a stranger in her former life.

The characters are fantastic. Every single one is  sympathetic, believable, and vulnerable. We see Tom, who is no more than a phantom name at the beginning, turn into a sweet caregiver as he escorts a pregnant girl across the country. Kevin struggles with both relating to his daughter and keeping things platonic with his daughter’s friend, who moves into their home after fleeing a bad domestic situation. And then there’s Nora, the mother and wife who loses her entire family, only to learn later that her husband isn’t who she thought he was. They’re all so full and complete and yum. I could gobble them up. Nomnomnom.

I generally don’t like to compare books, but since the reason for reading this was because of another book, I feel entitled to do so. It’s similar in the shake-up-in-a-smallish-town kind of way. It’s similar in that there’s isn’t much resolution in the lives of many of the characters. We never find out what really happened on October 14th, but it didn’t piss me off, because at some point, it ceased to matter. The crux of the conflict is the struggle between life going on and life being suspended in the wake of a massive upheaval. That struggle gives a quiet drive to The Leftovers, propelling the story forward even though the characters aren’t sure that they’re moving in the same direction.

Go pick it up. Let us know what you think. Go on, I’ll wait.

 

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