Having heard of the current HBO series that the novel inspired, I picked Tom Perrotta’s “The Leftovers” at least partially to find out what the buzz surrounding the series was all about.
Having now read it, I find the likening made by Stephen King of the “The Leftovers” to an episode of “The Twilight Zone” to be apt. The novel, while much less even and well plotted than an episode of that classic series, successfully captures the Kafka-esque spirit of a Rod Serling tale and makes itself worthy of a read on its own merits, whether one has seen the HBO series or not.
As anyone familiar with the series could explain, “The Leftovers” chronicles life after a rapture-like event known in the novel as the Sudden Departure. On Oct. 14, three years prior to the novel’s beginning, millions of people from every race, age, class and, most interestingly, creed disappeared from the face of the Earth without a trace.
Lingering in the background of the world of “The Leftovers” are various explanations — scientific and religious — as to the event’s cause, but the novel doesn’t explore these in any significant detail. “The Leftovers,” much like “The Twilight Zone,” is less interested in examining the supernatural as such and more in examining the interaction of the supernatural with ordinary, often frail, human nature.
Unlike an episode of “The Twilight Zone,” however, and often to its detriment, “The Leftovers” eschews — as do many contemporary novels — an overarching plot, opting to trail the lives of five separate but related individuals.
Some of these stories are compelling and fairly dynamic, such as that of character Nora Durst, a woman who lost her husband and both of her children to the Sudden Departure. She spends her post-rapture days pitifully watching old episodes of “Spongebob Squarepants” — her son’s favorite show —t o recapture a sense of her old life.
Others, such as that of Jill, a troubled teenager who lost her mother and brother to two different cults — many of them pop up after the Sudden Departure — feel out of place in this novel. Jill’s is a particularly weak and unnecessary thread, mainly because the low stakes of her story are not heightened when situated within the context of a post-rapture society.
Nevertheless, if one can make it through a few of these lesser threads, one will most likely find that the weightier threads more compelling than offset by the deficiencies of the lesser ones.
As I have indicated, one’s level of interest in a novel like “The Leftovers” will likely correlate with an interest in similar subject matter such as that of “The Twilight Zone” as well as topics such as the Milgram experiments on obedience.
Though not concerned with obedience as was Milgram, the world that Perrotta has created in “The Leftovers” much resembles the laboratory-crucible that Milgram built for his subjects, one in which the constitutions of ordinary people are tested through an extraordinary circumstance.
