Extremism rings true
By Stephen King |
August 28, 2011, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
GIVEN the subject of his new novel, "The Leftovers," probably no one followed the story of the noted evangelical (and former Internet hottie) Harold Camping more closely than Tom Perrotta, a novelist who is to the suburban enclaves of America what Sherwood Anderson was to Ohio. I'm betting that reviews of "The Leftovers" that do not link Perrotta and Camping will be few and far between.
For those of you who wasted the spring of 2011 following less substantive stories - tornadoes, nuclear meltdowns, unrest in the Mideast - Camping is a preacher with an apocalyptic worldview. Some Christians believe that when the rapture comes, those who have accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior will immediately be whisked off to heaven. The unbelieving majority will be left to suffer from five months to a year of war, disease and climatological upheaval.
After that, the earth will go pop and any surviving pagans will, presumably, be sent straight to hell.
It's hard to tell how many people believe in this lurid idea, but Camping's video assurances that the rapture was going to occur on May 21, 2011, quickly went viral; one site offered a digital countdown to the big nonevent. Certainly there's enough current interest in the End of Days to suggest that "The Leftovers," Perrotta's striking take on the rapture (or something like it), may be widely discussed and could become the subject of many a Sunday sermon. If so, it will deserve the attention.
Perrotta has delivered a troubling disquisition on how ordinary people react to extraordinary and inexplicable events, the power of family to hurt and to heal, and the unobtrusive ease with which faith can slide into fanaticism. "The Leftovers" is, simply put, the best "Twilight Zone" episode you never saw.
The Garvey family - Kevin, Laurie and their two children, Tom and Jill - are the Mapleton residents at the center of Perrotta's novel, which opens three years after a rapturelike event has whisked millions of people off the face of the earth. Nor do all (or even most) of the missing qualify as Camping-style Christians; those raptured away include Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews and the odd alcoholic. Perrotta began his exploration of the stress points between religion and secular American life in his previous novel, "The Abstinence Teacher." "The Leftovers" feels like a logical, if extreme, extension of those concerns. Not every character and motivation rings perfectly true, but the slow, sad drift of this suburban world into various forms of cultic extremism as a response to upheaval feels spot on. The breakdown of rationality is best expressed by the Guilty Remnant's central imperative, stated near the beginning of the novel and then again at the end: "Stop Wasting Your Breath."
Yet the novel isn't completely bleak. If it were, we would care no more about these characters than about the ones who populate the post-apocalyptic "Mad Max" films. In fact, we come to care about them deeply.
For those of you who wasted the spring of 2011 following less substantive stories - tornadoes, nuclear meltdowns, unrest in the Mideast - Camping is a preacher with an apocalyptic worldview. Some Christians believe that when the rapture comes, those who have accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior will immediately be whisked off to heaven. The unbelieving majority will be left to suffer from five months to a year of war, disease and climatological upheaval.
After that, the earth will go pop and any surviving pagans will, presumably, be sent straight to hell.
It's hard to tell how many people believe in this lurid idea, but Camping's video assurances that the rapture was going to occur on May 21, 2011, quickly went viral; one site offered a digital countdown to the big nonevent. Certainly there's enough current interest in the End of Days to suggest that "The Leftovers," Perrotta's striking take on the rapture (or something like it), may be widely discussed and could become the subject of many a Sunday sermon. If so, it will deserve the attention.
Perrotta has delivered a troubling disquisition on how ordinary people react to extraordinary and inexplicable events, the power of family to hurt and to heal, and the unobtrusive ease with which faith can slide into fanaticism. "The Leftovers" is, simply put, the best "Twilight Zone" episode you never saw.
The Garvey family - Kevin, Laurie and their two children, Tom and Jill - are the Mapleton residents at the center of Perrotta's novel, which opens three years after a rapturelike event has whisked millions of people off the face of the earth. Nor do all (or even most) of the missing qualify as Camping-style Christians; those raptured away include Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews and the odd alcoholic. Perrotta began his exploration of the stress points between religion and secular American life in his previous novel, "The Abstinence Teacher." "The Leftovers" feels like a logical, if extreme, extension of those concerns. Not every character and motivation rings perfectly true, but the slow, sad drift of this suburban world into various forms of cultic extremism as a response to upheaval feels spot on. The breakdown of rationality is best expressed by the Guilty Remnant's central imperative, stated near the beginning of the novel and then again at the end: "Stop Wasting Your Breath."
Yet the novel isn't completely bleak. If it were, we would care no more about these characters than about the ones who populate the post-apocalyptic "Mad Max" films. In fact, we come to care about them deeply.
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