In the mega-selling Left Behind novels, millions of Christians vanish in a puff of divine smoke called the Rapture, leaving a troubled world ripe for takeover by the Antichrist who is, of course, secretary-general of the United Nations. It's too good a scenario to be left to pulpish evangelical thrillers, so Tom Perrotta has written a post-Rapture novel that poses the interesting question of whether a more literary, secular treatment of the theme, eschewing global battles against a devil incarnate, is inevitably also more boring.
The novel opens three years after the Rapture, and the inhabitants of a small town called Mapleton are still trying to deal with it. Nora's husband and children were spirited away, and she now watches Spongebob Squarepants religiously. Kevin, the mayor, has been abandoned by his son Tom (who has joined the "Healing Hug movement" led by a charismatic speaker with a penchant for teenage Asian hotties), and also his wife Laurie, shacked up with a more mysterious cult, the "Guilty Remnant". They go around town in pairs, dressed in white and smoking, staring at people to remind them that God has delivered his judgment.
As Kevin begins to covet Nora's ass, things proceed in the manner of a sensitive Franzenesque soap opera, about the ways people deal with what is usually euphemised as "loss". In any good soap, cliché and stereotype are indispensable: Kevin was a "prominent local businessman" (when is a successful local businessman anything but "prominent"?), and there is a lovely cameo for a fat police chief, guiltily scoffing a muffin. ("I already gave up booze and sex. I'll be damned if I'm gonna give up breakfast.") It's all comfortingly televisual, and an HBO series is already "in development". I'm not sure how they'll film the moment when Kevin, seeing Nora with new eyes as a milf fatale, experiences "an actual and highly ironic stirring in his groin". (What would an only mildly ironic stirring in his groin be like? Perhaps it would make him a less prominent businessman.)
Even so, and as also in any good soap, there is a tremendous amount of subtle high-end craft going on, to keep people and information moving around efficiently, and to hit end-of-episode emotional climaxes. (Perrotta is a wizard at wrenching chapter endings.) And the novel's grace is that it also keeps the reader consistently amused. There is a lot of perfectly ventriloquised dissident teenage humour, and a deliciously throwaway surreal moment when Nora happens upon a man sacrificing a sheep in a forest: "Both the man and the sheep gazed at Nora with startled, unhappy expressions, as if she'd caught them in an act they would have preferred to remain private."
Late on, a darker suspense is injected as various characters toy with decisions that you know will be disastrous for them. "No, don't do it!" you want to shout to one. "You neither!" to another. Well, one person does one thing, and the other does another, and then it's over. Despite sporadic lip-service to its eschatological theme, this was never really a Rapture novel. Perrotta is not interested in teasing out all the event's large-scale social and political implications, as José Saramago would have taken ironic delight in doing. Here, the spooky prologue is just a convenient allegorical disaster to usher in a time of emotional tribulation among individuals: it stands in for 9/11, tsunami or pandemic, as the reader sees fit. It won't spoil much, then, to say that The Leftovers doesn't end in flaming Armageddon. But after it did finish, I was somewhat less than enraptured.
