So right now I’d like to start Alabama Liberal’s Book Club Selection both to promote great books that I like and also to counter the notion that nobody in Alabama reads. Each month I’ll be picking a different novel and hoping that maybe (juuuuuust maybe) someone might read it because I told them to, thus making me the (very) poor man’s Oprah.
I will also try to tie each selection into a theme for the month (such as “Love” for February), and in keeping with that January’s selection is Tom Perrota’s The Leftovers. This book is a realistic, moving, and sometimes very funny satire about what would happen if The Rapture actually did happen instead of just being incorrectly prophesied about by small time cult leaders. And so I think it’s actually a great book to start the year off with and maybe keep the “I love life” momentum going from New Year’s Day.
I guess I should clarify by saying that the event that kick starts the book may not actually be The Rapture, it’s just a mass, mysterious, seemingly random disappearance of millions of people at exactly the same time and everyone just calls it The Rapture. It then spins off NOT into solving the mystery of all the people that went missing in the blink of an eye (the book doesn’t say just so you have fair warning but by the end I didn’t even care because I was so caught up in the living characters) but in covering all the ones left behind. You guessed it, “The Leftovers.”
Tom Perrota—-the gifted satirist behind the book’s “Election” and “Little Children”—-excels at taking this seemingly fantastical event and trying to realistically cover how people would react to it. Would some people join a cult group hoping to make God’s “next cut?” Would others devote their life to a shady prophet that says he can heal them but might really just be cruising for young girls? Would more develop a “Fuck it” attitude and start partying non-stop? Would preachers that are left behind become bitter that God didn’t take them? Would a few people become desperate to just try to keep living normally as everyone around them lives crazy? The answer is, of course, yes, and much more. The novel deftly keeps a half dozen major characters and plot lines going at all times so that we can equally get inside the head of a woman who abandons her family to join a silent, dehumanizing cult group or an angry woman who lost her whole family while getting up to get a paper towel during dinner or the novel’s everyman hero mayor who’s just trying to keep his loved ones (and town) from collapse.
I say this is the perfect book to kick the year off with because by the end of this book I felt very…lucky to be alive. And that isn’t to say that the book is depressing in any way. Just that this funny, touching, sharp, surprising, and wholly original novel really takes you on a journey where by the end there’s no question that it’s better to be one of “The Leftovers.”
Click on the book image to get a copy.