The Leftovers a novel by Tom Perrotta

In The Leftovers, Tom Perrotta uses a startling premise to produce a realist portrait of the fault lines that fracture modern society.  The story is set in a small suburban town somewhere on the east coast.  It is a few years after the Sudden Departure, when millions of people, instantly and without explanation, vanished from the Earth.  Was it the Rapture spoken of in the Bible?  But then, many who vanished were not Christians.  Mr. Perrotta leaves that question to hang, while he explores the effects of the traumatic event on a town full of ordinary people. 

This isn't a book with a lot of plot twists.  People move through their lives. Some try to keep things normal while others form cult movements.  A messianic figure may have a genuine gift or he may be a charlatan; his unborn child may or may not be the savior of mankind.  Some funny stuff happens in between the darker moments.  One memorable character  is the woman who lost her husband and two kids. She watches Sponge Bob Squarepants because it was the show her vanished children liked. She is obsessive, but organized about it. At first, she goes through a marathon of cartoon watching, but soon begins to ration the number of daily episodes to keep them fresh. Her attempts to rebuild a social life are the ungainly efforts of any recently divorced person, writ large. It is safer to retreat but hard to be alone, even if all you can do is have a guy watch cartoons with you.

Perrotta has been called the Balzac of the suburbs, a Cheever for our times, and a lot of other heavy titles that reviewers like to hang on authors, as if to see whether they can bear the weight.  I haven't read his other books, though I gather The Leftovers is something of a departure for him.  But the book conveys humor and affection for people, even while it shows them as deeply flawed. The author gives us the common threads that we share with his characters, which is what makes the book so readable.

The Last Werewolf, by Glen Duncan

It’s clear how self-aware Glen Duncan was of the tradition he attempts to navigate in The Last Werewolf, focused on the final months of the moribund race of lycanthropes. He negotiates a genre of horror we’ve become accustomed to, a vogue of monstrosity that’s returned from the depths of our imaginations after several decades of hibernation in which werewolves were merely fodder for satire, a campy terror that no longer haunted the nightmares of our subconscious. Not unlike Anne Rice’s Vampire series, Duncan invites the readership to reexamine lycanthropes, both to understand aspects of their humanity—or rather the crisis of being physically ripped from it each full moon—and view them within a narrative that’s persisted in folklore for hundreds of years. Jacob Marlowe’s narration is possessed of a certain eloquence, his speech fragmented with astute literary allusions, so off-handedly quipped that we come to understand him as a man very much in love with words and the importance of recognizing those storytellers that matter, just as Duncan does not presume to ignore the multitude of literary renderings the werewolf has undergone. Marlowe’s tendency to wax poetic is construed as his medium to wrestle with notions of morality while so Cursed. Duncan parses lyrical sentences with oblique references to Blake or Tennyson to give the reader a sense of the vital importance words have for Marlowe, a meta-commentary on his own risk to reimagine lycanthropy. However, this eloquence breaks down further into the narrative as the tempo increases.

Apart from establishing Marlowe’s verbosity, the first chapter immediately sets the pacing of the novel. The reader must scramble through the first several chapters to become orientated to the narration, to make sense of the sudden deluge of information. Just as Jake is suddenly in the throes of a desperate battle for survival, the reader must quickly adjust to the lack of quiet or stillness in the prose. Everything is told with a foreboding immediacy, the plot given a sense of movement. Unlike Rice’s Vampire novels –which include chase scenes but focus primarily on the morality struggles of blood kin, heavy and sometimes opulent cogitation—Duncan’s werewolf is one uncomfortable in the stasis of contemplation. Marlowe is clearly a creature of kinetic energy, constantly prowling about the world to escape the hunters and prey—he has the same vagabond temperament as the wolf that lurks within him. With the quick pacing of The Last Werewolf, it reads more like a thriller than an epic exploration of the boundary between the bestial and human. Duncan invites the reader to understand the life of rapid travel Marlowe leads, the sense that remaining in a single place is antithetical to the nature of the werewolf, one that seethes with the single mantra Fuckkilleat. The speed is instinctual, quickened by chapters that are merely several sentences, forcing the reader to flip immediately to the next page.

Despite Duncan’s modern take on lycanthropy, discussing were-viruses as our contemporary world continues to whip up vaccines that no longer stave off violent disease, and his metanarrative recognition of the difficulty of writing something new and exciting and visceral about werewolves, I don’t feel as though the foundations of the genre have been at all shaken. Duncan straddles suspense and elegance, though remains unsure of his footing. As we are increasingly accelerated to the climax of the novel, one finds oneself wishing to read more spoken from the mouth of the intellectual, brooding Jacob Marlowe, less the animal that finds satisfaction in pure action.

Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin

Kyung-Sook Shin is one of South Korea’s most widely read and acclaimed novelists and this is her first book to appear in English. The story revolves around the search for a missing older woman who was left behind in the Seoul train station when she was separated from her husband in the rush to board a departing train. As the chapters unfold we learn the woman’s “back story” as remembered by her oldest daughter, oldest son, husband, and, later in the book, herself. The stories touch on all aspects of her life in a poor rural South Korean village and span the time from her youth during the Korean War and its aftermath, her marriage, the birth and rearing of her children, and her decline into older age.

While the story provides an excellent view into a family’s life in Korea, this reader found it difficult to enjoy. The use of the omnipotent second person narrative voice (used in 3 of the 5 chapters) was off-putting. Perhaps 2nd person is used more widely in conversational Korean and I was unable to adjust to the translation or maybe the author used it deliberately to impose the guilt and regret felt by the characters onto the reader. Whatever the reason, the relentless use of “you” (even though the narrator’s “you” was referring to one of the characters in the story) felt like an accusatory pointing finger which made me uncomfortable. I also had little sympathy for the martyred “Tiger Mom” and her selfish, insensitive children and spouse. So for me, this was a B- read; it was well written and interesting, but it only rarely touched my heart.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

A Visit from the Goon Squad begins by introducing us to Sasha, an intriguing character, in the first chapter, who is a kleptomaniac. Then in Chapter 2, we are introduced to Bennie, who is Sasha's boss at a record company. As you wend your way through the story, you discover that each chapter is a story loosely connected to the person before it. By the time you reach the last chapter, you've come full circle.

Goon Squad is well written. Egan has done a masterful job at weaving together the lives of different characters from different points of view at different time periods in their lives. The PowerPoint chapter likely put Egan in the winner's circle for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. It's an innovative telling of an entire story in PowerPoint.

The most troublesome thing about Goon Squad is that some of the passages go beyond the average reader's head. Chapter 9, a reflection on a celebrity interview gone awry, has footnotes about quantum physics and protons. There's a continual sense of hopelessness running throughout the book: people get old, people die, people are miserable, and everybody in the book does, or has done, drugs at some point in their lives. Goon Squad offers a sad depiction of life with few glimmers of hope. A few chapters are boring.

A Visit from the Goon Squad has an innovative chapter, instances of good writing, and masterful weaving of tales and timelines.

The Silent Land by Graham Joyce

     At just under 300 pages, this is the book to pick up if you want something you can finish in an evening, on a plane ride or on a day at the beach. It is definitely for you if you were addicted to the TV show, Lost.

     The story takes you to the high peaks of the French Pyrenees on a breathtakingly beautiful early morning. Jake and Zoe have the pristine snowy slopes to themselves as they push off on their skis. In the blink of an eye, light hearted sport turns into a terrifying race against the crushing waves of a tumultuous avalanche.
     They manage to survive this near tragedy, only to discover that the world they left behind as they made their early morning ascent up the mountains has become a silent and eerie land. What has happened and why are they here?

     Skillfully written, you will travel this terrain and puzzle along with the young couple as more and more clues bring this story to an ultimately satisfying conclusion. A short book, a short review and no desire to give away too much, this is a story that will entertain and keep you reading!