The Leftovers

While reading The Leftovers, it was difficult not to compare it to Stephen King's Under the Dome - and not just because the two books have recently been adapted into television series. Each novel is about the aftermath of an unexpected and inexplicable tragic event. In Under the Dome, an invisible and impenetrable barrier appears out of nowhere around a small town in Maine, trapping a few thousand residents inside with no access to the outside world. In The Leftovers, a Rapture-like event occurs without build-up or warning, and two percent of the world's population simply vanishes without a trace. In both stories, the instigating event isn't really what matters; rather, the various ways people react to trauma and tragedy are what drive the stories forward.

Their similarities more or less end there, though. King's book is massive, bloated, and filled mostly with dozens of one-dimensional characters who fall neatly into bins labeled either "evil" or "stupid." The quest to find out where the dome came from and how to destroy it hangs around in the background as a C-story for several hundred pages before resolving itself in laughably bad fashion with a few chapters to go. In The Leftovers, the "how" and the "why" are never really explored in any detail. Something terrible and confusing has happened, people have reacted to it in a variety of ways, and we spend a modest 350 pages following four or five of them around and seeing what day-to-day life is like as they attempt to reestablish the things that matter in life long after they've given up trying to make sense of anything that's happened.

It should come as no surprise that I much preferred The Leftovers to Under the Dome, appreciating Tom Perrotta's reflections on the nature of loss and coping more than Stephen King's mad spiral of chaos and poor decisions. That's not to say, however, that The Leftovers was a perfect book. After an engrossing start, in which the various protagonists were introduced and their situational motivations were established, the novel lost a little bit of steam. Perhaps this was by design - start the book off with a climactic event, and the natural basic plot line could simply be society's slow return to normalcy. For about two hundred pages in the middle, I was wondering if the entire story was "building" to a non-conclusion. Ultimately, that wasn't the case, and I can't really say confidently that this book was an intentional anti-story. Plot took a backseat to characters, no question, but there wasn't enough deep introspection going on in The Leftovers to elevate the book as high as its initial premise may have warranted.

This wasn't a bad read by any means, but it was simultaneously too soft and vague to be a great satire, too plot-heavy to be a pure character analysis, and too open-ended to make for a well-paced or tightly wound narrative. In the end, it was a well-written book with some memorable and well-defined characters, and you could do a whole lot worse. The Leftovers was occasionally slow and didn't live up to every aspect of its potential, but it made for a quality summer vacation book. Now, let's see if the HBO series can build outward and stretch this 350-page book into something bigger, better, and deeper.