Shhh! I'm Reading.

There are plenty of ways to imagine the apocalypse. You can go the zombie route; very de rigueur. You can go environmental catastrophe which has a kind of Jerry Bruckheimer bent to it. Let’s see, alien invasion? Unnamed manmade catastrophe. Artificial intelligence takeover a la H.G. Wells. Social-scientific engineering run amok. Rotisseried infants shouldn’t be attempted unless your name is Cormac McCarthy. Plenty of writers have made admirable work of each of these approaches. Colson Whitehead’s recent addition to the canon, Zone One, was particularly worthwhile (and is heartily recommended). 

Something you don’t see all that often however is an end of times narrative that is both totally banal and deadpan funny. Tom Perrotta might be the only writer working today capable of pulling off that heady mashup and his latest novel The Leftovers does not dissapoint. It is both a playful exercise in upsetting the expectations attendant to apocalypse genre fiction and a very personal family drama. And Perrotta delivers his usual one-two-punch of sardonic wit and sentiment (if you’re new to Perrotta I urge you to add Election to your holiday reading stacks as well.)

In Perotta’s hands, the apocalypse / end of days / whatever you want to call it is a kind of Rapturesque event: no one is really sure what happened except to say that a lot of people suddenly disappeared. It is infuriatingly indiscriminate as far as the spiritually inclined are concerned - some right bastards were taken and plenty of godly folk were left behind - and totally boring. There are still mortgages to be paid, classes to attend, groceries to be purchased in legitimate ways. There was no cataclysmic event to mark the moment when people’s loved ones were taken; one minute they were there and the next they just weren’t. There’s a great moment when one of the characters recollects that she went to the kitchen to get some paper towel to clean up her child’s spilled apple juice - annoyed at having conceded to the child’s insistence at drinking in a regular cup rather than a sippy cup - and returned to find the spill waiting for her but her family gone. The book is peppered with such gems, poignant and remorselessly funny in equal measure. 

There’s something peculiar going on with the environments apocalyptically inclined writers are partial to setting their tales in. The alien invasion narrative seems most at home in rural spaces: all the better for crop circles and spaceship landings. The zombiepocalypse is most often an urban affair. Perhaps because you’re more likely to be cornered by a zombie in the back alley of a city than in a cul-de-sac. There’s probably a whole logic having to do with the rapid spread of pathogens in urban environs as well but I’ll leave such speculations to the Walking Dead fans. There are penty of exceptions of course, especially in film. Dawn of the Dead went all suburban mall nightmare to genius effect. Either way, I can recall few examples of a novel about the end of times that was quite so Norman Rockwell Main Street idyll in its setting. Which is a large part of why the novel works so well. It’s so deliciously unthinkable. Apocalypse in Mapleton! How very David Lynch!

Perrotta seems most interested in how it is that we get on with our lives in light of how utterly unforgiving the job of being human is. The rapture is a convenient trope to explore what happens when we become untethered; the choices we would make if we didn’t have to worry about fulfilling the role of wife, mother, brother etc.

Perrotta gives us some of what we would expect of an end of days experience in the various cults that populate the novel: the Barefoot People (a kind of extreme hippy sect with serious issues regarding footwear), the Holy Wayne / Healing Hug Movement (who fall in behind a prophet who starts out as a kind of sincere self-help guru but who goes all David Koresh pretty fast), and the Guilty Remnant who have taken a vow of silence but who follow the citizens of Mapleton around and watch them intently to what end we’re never sure. While cult movements are perhaps a natural offspring of the end of the world, they also serve to answer at least one of the questions this book poses. If we were pulled free of our moorings and if, as any grieving person knows all too well, we couldn’t reclaim what was lost, where would we seek refuge? Daringly, Perrotta suggests that it might not be where those that love us expect us to find it. The lives we’ve chosen, when forced to take stock, might not make sense anymore. 

(photo via A Seattleite in Paris)