Welcome back to Books With Cause. Let’s dive straight into my next review. This one’s about a world altered forever, not by explosion or invasion, but by absence.
By nature, I’ve become a book hoarder in recent years. Books arrive at my house almost weekly in their numbers. I have piles and shelves waiting to be read. But on top of all that, I’m constantly requesting books from my local library. Then, when I pick up books from the library, they have to become the priority because they have a return due date. The Leftovers is a book I’ve been meaning to check out for some time. My brother, Andy, first made me aware of the book and its adaptation into a television series. It was only when I read Christopher Eccleston’s book at the tail end of last year, and he briefly mentions the show, that it accelerated my plans to read the book.
This book takes place in a world where 2% of the world population disappears in the blink of an eye, never to be seen again. That 2% equates to about 140,000,000 when this book was published. Imagine that. One hundred and forty million people disappearing into thin air. The story starts three years later with everybody who lives in the town of Mapleton left trying to get on with life. A new normal. Nearly all of them have lost at least somebody. A lot of people have lost many people close to them.
There are many who believe that what happened on that day was the Rapture. This has led a lot of people to join a group known as the Guilty Remnant (or GR for short). Members of the GR abstain from everything. They dress head to toe in all white. They take a lifetime vow of silence. They live together with nothing in the way of luxuries and exist only to remind everybody else of the lives that were lost three years ago.
At the heart of our story is Kevin Garvey. A local businessman who feels compelled to run for mayor in order to bring people together after the event. That could be easier said than done, considering he can barely hold his own family together. He is estranged from his wife, Laurie, who has left him to join the GR. His adult son, Tom, was away at college when the event happened, and has since joined a cult led by the mysterious, Holy Wayne. And then there’s Kevin’s teenage daughter, Jill, who is a senior in high school and struggling to find her place in this world. She is constantly led astray by her best friend, Aimee. The pair of them are frequently truanting school, smoking weed, and attending house parties where they play a lewd version of spin the bottle.
At the time of writing this review, I have seen four episodes of the adapted television series. While this isn’t intended as a comparison between the two, I thought I’d watch a few episodes just so I could get a little taste of the world and the characters. Justin Theroux as Kevin and Margaret Qualley as Jill are particularly brilliant in their roles. The show is similar but different.
My biggest takeaway is that the idea of the story is potentially too big for the 355 pages it spans. With such a massive concept and so many characters, I didn’t feel like there was enough time for everything to breathe in the way it deserved. And when it comes to characters, because there are so many of them, there were only a few that I knew who they were. The rest I had to go, “Wait a minute, who is this one again?” But sometimes books require the reader to do a little work. This is one of those books where the work is worth doing.
My Goodreads rating: ★★★★☆ (4 stars)
