Depending on whether you view religion as the answer to the world’s problems or the cause of a lot of them, you may or may not enjoy Tom Perrotta’s thought-provoking novel The Leftovers.
I liked it. But then, he had me at “leftovers.”
Many of us lucky enough to live in the world’s most obese and privileged nation share a common “problem.” After we’ve finished our dinners, whether we eat out or cook at home, what to do with the leftovers: save them or not?
This question is at the heart of Perrotta’s lightly satirical riff on the idea of The Rapture, the belief that when the end of the world comes, and it’s a’comin’ soon according to some folks, the good people who followed the rules and stuck to the straight and very narrow path will be whisked away to eternal joy, while those who strayed, or didn’t manage to follow the directions on the side of the box will be left behind to scratch their heads and lick their wounds in abject misery.
Or not.
And therein lies the tale. What makes Perrotta’s prose so delicious to me is how easily he weaves the absurd with the seemingly sensible. Thus, as the story reveals how the lives of the leftovers are dramatically changed, we see some characters accept the “Sudden Departure” as a judgement on their own behavior, while others take leave of their senses entirely. The premise mines a rich vein of human folly, but Perrotta always respects his characters. He reveals their weaknesses but never diminishes the effort it takes to stay sane in a world that no longer makes sense.
This message resonates all too clearly in our real world, where the incidence of unbalanced individuals committing mass murder appears to be a trend rather than a rarity.
People in pain can lose their ability to behave rationally. People without hope are like dry leaves in the path of a wildfire. Any little spark can set them off.
As Bob Dylan once wrote:
Too much of nothing can make a man ill at ease
One man’s temper might rise, another man’s temper might freeze
In the day of confession we cannot mock a soul
When there’s too much of nothing, no one has control.
We live in dangerous times. Some people turn to religion for answers. Others turn on religion.
And then there’s Tom Perrotta, who offers a fresh perspective on the human need for connection, for love, for hope, with or without religion. In The Leftovers he seems to suggest that, as any good cook knows, even the saddest, homeliest looking leftovers can still make a fine meal. They just need to be carefully warmed up and served with love.
Don’t we all?