"The thing that makes so distinctive is that they're smoking constantly," says Perrotta. The father, Kevin, watches as his teenagers change and his wife, Laurie, leaves his house to join a cult called "The Guilty Remnant," whose members dress all in white and take a vow of silence. The Garvey family, for instance, didn't lose any family members in the rapture but has fallen apart in the aftermath. Perrotta's novel takes place after the rapture, in a small New Jersey suburb, where families are trying to get on with their lives. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. No matter what horrible thing happens in the world, the culture seems to move on."Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Leftovers Author Tom Perrotta I thought, I'm such a skeptic that even if it did happen, I would resist the implications of it, and I also thought that three years later, everyone would have forgotten about it. But I kept thinking: What if it did happen?. to laugh it off - it's sort of a funny idea, people just floating away. "I spent a lot of time thinking about contemporary Christianity, and obviously the rapture kept coming up," he says. Perrotta tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that he got the idea for the novel while traveling around the country, doing speaking engagements for The Abstinence Teacher, his novel about small-town culture wars. The date passed by with no apparent rapture, and Camping became the butt of many late-night talk show jokes.īut what if the rapture did actually occur? That's the premise of Tom Perrotta's latest novel, The Leftovers, which examines the aftermath of an unexplained rapturelike event in which millions of people around the globe inexplicably disappear into thin air. Tom Perrotta is the author of several novels, including Election and Little Children.Įarlier this year, California-based preacher Harold Camping announced that the beginning of the end of the world would take place on May 21, 2011.
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