Tom Perrotta's latest novel explores what happens after a Rapture-like disappearance, so readers of his earlier work might expect The Leftovers to be smug and mocking.
Instead, Perrotta has written his most sympathetic, and, as a consequence, best novel. His 1998 breakout book, "Election," was funny, but turned into harsh social satire populated by unlikable characters. In 2007, "The Abstinence Teacher," captured the culture wars'fixation on sex education, but too often read like a polemic -- complete with stereotypes serving as character stand-ins.
In "The Leftovers" though, Perrotta finds balance in the aftermath of what seems to be a "random harvest" of millions of souls -- many of the missing weren't Christians, and many of those left behind feel personally rejected by God.
Reactions vary: some turn to cults, some build rationalizations for being leftover, and some struggle to make sense of a now tenuous existence. As "The Leftovers" shifts perspectives, tracking a suburban New Jersey community three years after the Sudden Departure, Perrotta writes with a nuanced compassion. He brought me back into his fold.
For reviews of five other noteworthy paperbacks:
The Cat's Table
Ondaatje's latest novel "sometimes uses the colouring and locations of memoir and autobiography" in depicting an 11-year-old boy's three-week voyage on an ocean liner from Sri Lanka to his mother's house in England.
The story meanders through episodes on the ship as the narrator recounts his 1954 voyage, describes a menagerie of eccentric and memorable passengers and recalls the friendships he forms with two other young boys. As his story goes on, he links the events of those 21 days to his current life in Canada.
Ondaatje's writing remains distinguished, and he excels in imbuing "The Cat's Table" with elegiac moments, but the narrative lumbers compared to the accomplishments of "The English Patient," "Anil's Ghost" and "Divisadero."
Plain Dealer reviewer Susan Grimm praised Ondaatje for plunging readers "into the itchy, elastic, thirsty being of an 11-year-old boy set loose," capturing "the state of being a child -- the hunger for worldly knowledge, the physical resilience made of rubber and snap, the tentative exploration of emotion."
She also enjoyed the novel's secondary characters, "little jewels, glistening with rough glamour and authentic interest" who form "a regular 'Canterbury Tales' parade of love, loss and endeavor."
Still, Grimm saw a split in the story as she felt the portion of the novel set in the present seems "colorless and inconsequential "and "so much less substantial -- as if it were the period veiled by time."
"All the fire, the interest, the strength of the characters," she concluded, "occur when they are knotted together on ship. It is the boy who captures us, not the man, before all his wonder is spent."
Tucker, a scholar of the history of medicine and French studies at Vanderbilt University, offers "A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution.""Blood Work" documents scientists' attempts in the 1660s to perform successful blood transfusions, focusing on a case involving French physician Jean-Baptiste Denis. While Denis performed the first successful animal-to-human blood transfusion, giving a 15-year-old boythe blood of a lamb, a later experiment resulted in the death of a 34-year-old mentally ill man and accusations of murder.
Tucker views her book as a microhistory tracing Denis' court case and the history of blood transfusions, but also sees it as a "macrohistory that traces confluence of ideas, discoveries, and cultural, political, and religious forces that made blood transfusions even thinkable in this era before anesthesia, antisepsis, and the knowledge of blood groups." As she explains, "This story is, then, as much about the scientific revolution -- its greatest minds and most calculating monarchs -- as it is about blood transfusion itself."
In The Minneapolis Star Tribune, Jack El-Hai complimented Tucker for capturing the way "medicine evolves not in a succession of triumphs but often along a path littered with bad ideas and sickening incidents." He pointed to her description of the first inter-speciesblood transfusion, finding it "chilling, like a page out of H.G. Wells' 'The Island of Doctor Moreau.' "
Such moments fill the book as Tucker "tells her tale with verve and a willingness to follow wherever her wide-ranging research leads." El-Hai acknowledged that "sometimes it leads her into digressions, including accounts of the ascent of King Louis XIV and the legaltravails of the editor of a pioneering English scientific journal, minor players in the story."
"More often," however, "Tucker uses her research to explain the cultural and medical environment in which transfusion fascinated its advocates, outraged its opponents and dragged Denis to trial as an accused murderer after one of his experimental subjects died."
As El-Hai explained, "Most gripping nonfiction narratives have three qualities that pull readers from page to page: dramatic events, a context that gives those events consequence and complex, well-developed characters."
While he found that "the events in 'Blood Work' hold us in a blood-splattered thrall and make clear their significance in the history of medicine," El-Hai observed that in selecting hercharacters, "Tucker has taken on a huge challenge. Denis and his rich patron, Henri-Louis Habert de Montmor, the most important figures in the story, lived 400 years ago and left behind only traces of their lives."
El-Hai acknowledged that some of these gaps in historical record "swallow the faces and motivations of her characters and sometimes force Tucker to focus her attention elsewhere. The book's spectacle and gory detail, though, more than compensate for characters who flitin and out of shadows."
Stephanie Vaughn(Other, 180 pp.)
Vaughn, who was born in Millersburg, Ohio, originally saw her debut collection of 10 stories published in 1990. In her work, especially through linked stories wrapped around a girl named Gemma and her family's life at various Army posts, readers will see connections to Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" and Siobhan Fallon's "You Know When the Men Are Gone."
In his introduction to the collection, Tobias Wolff explains that he first encountered Vaughn's work in The New Yorker in the late 1970s, and that more than two decades later, he stills feels "the startled pleasure" he "experienced then at the freshness of her vision and voice, her effortless mastery of the form, her affectionate wit, her forgiving but clear-eyed view of the confused, fumbling, deceiving, self-deceived, mostly well-intended souls whose lives sheobserves."
When Michiko Kakutani reviewed "Sweet Talk" in 1990, she wrote that Vaughn possessed a "gift for capturing the rhythms of conversation, a gift for hearing how people talk, how they connect or don't connect." Moreover, Kakutani explained, Vaughn is "able to use this gift to map entire lives, to read in her people's pronouncements, circumlocutions and non sequiturs, the secrets of character and personality."
Through Vaughn's "evocative descriptions of small-town life, and its familial configurations," Kakutani saw comparisons to Jayne Anne Phillips's "Machine Dreams." Though "Sweet Talk" is "not nearly as ambitious as that novel, this volume demonstrates a similar ability to delineate a vanished past, and to make ordinary, unfulfilled lives yield resonance and meaning."
"At the same time," Kakutani went on to note, "Vaughn emerges as a thoroughly original writer, blessed with a distinctive voice, by turns witty and lyrical, wisecracking and nostalgic. She's someone who can conjure up the sadness of 'a green, antique island' one moment, theabsurd plight of catching lice from a lover, the next."
However, Kakutani did see a divide in the collection in the way "Vaughn's strength as a writer emerges most clearly in the more elegiac, first-person stories devoted to Gemma's childhood and youth. The later tales -- some of which abandon Gemma to focus on less clearlydefined heroines -- tend to veer into self-conscious flippancy. The sense of place, so sure in the Gemma stories, dissolves in the California tales into familiar descriptions of highways and fast-food restaurants; and the prose can turn oddly grandiloquent."
Still, Kakutani argued that such lapses "should not discourage the reader from reading 'Sweet Talk,'" as "the Gemma stories are each beautifully observed, emotionally vivid pieces of writing, and together they mark the debut of a wonderful new writer."
The Land at the End of the World
Antonio Lobo Antunes; translated by Margaret Jull Costa (W. W. Norton, 222 pp.)$15.95
Originally published in Portugal in 1979, Lobo Antunes' second novel stems from his experiences as a medic in the country's colonial wars in Africa in the 1970s.
Narrated by a Portuguese medic unable to move on after his tour of duty in Angola, the novel breaks a dense monologue into 23 chapters, with paragraphs that often span more than a page. As the unnamed narrator tries to seduce a woman at a bar, his story takes on a confessional air, delving into the atrocities he witnessed on the frontline and the traumas that haunt him afterwards.
In The New York Times, reviewer Larry Rohter drew comparisons between the work of Lobo Antunes and Jos Saramago, but found Lobo Antunes to be "the more subtle and sardonic of the two. Where the doctrinaire Saramago saw simple blacks and whites (communism and atheism good, fascism and Catholicism bad), Mr. Lobo Antunes is an equal-opportunity skeptic, firing darts at all kinds of targets, including his narrator."
Rohter noted that Lobo Antunes' novel was first published "four years after Portugal's withdrawal from Africa and the final collapse of America's intervention in Vietnam," and that "at that time it was interpreted as a comment on the inherent futility of those recent Western adventures in the third world."
More than "30 years' remove from those events," Rohter explained, "much of this account of what Mr. Lobo Antunes' narrator calls a 'painful apprenticeship in dying' would no doubt make sense to survivors of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars."
Rohter praised the author as "an unusually observant writer," but he also extolled Jull Costa's work as a translator rendering "the novelist's language and style." While Lobo Antunes "has created a memorably unhinged narrator," Justa Costa "manages to capture, perfectly and faithfully, the bitter, hallucinatory and increasingly desperate tone of his monologue."
Though Lobo Antunes' work has often focused on "Portugal's troubled history, in particular the scars left by colonialism," Rohter said that "The Land at the End of the World" first "enabled [Lobo Antunes] to open that floodgate." As this "fine translation shows," he concluded, "it continues to stack up against the best of his later, more mature and experimental work."
John Fox (Harper Perennial, 373 pp.)
"There are few activities that feel as frivolous, and as deeply satisfying, as a good game of catch," Fox writes in his introduction.
Subtitled "Discovering the Object of the Game," his book stems from a simple question asked by his 7-year-old son, Aidan: "Why do we play ball, anyway?"
In coming up with an answer, Fox travels the world, examining the sports and ball games of various cultures throughout history. Occasionally, he loses himself in anthropological details, noting the way a research team scoured "satellite images shot from Honduran military planes looking for the orderly rectilinear patterns of ancient foundation walls and buried courtyards beneath the tropical canopy" of the jungle.
His tone varies between that of the dry academic and the immature juvenile who "discovered with delight" that the losers of an ancient Mayan ritual contest "were sometimes sacrificed through decapitation."
Still, when he describes the actual sports, Fox can engage, as when he discusses the origins of tennis and the ways ancient games were actually played.
While the pleasures of "a timeless, quiet rhythm" and the "repeated thwap of ball against glove" probably don't require much of an academic explanation, Fox puts together an interesting, though disjointed history of ball sports.
In The Wall Street Journal, Will Blythe came away with a mixed reaction, labeling the book "a mishmash" of science, history and evolutionary biology.
While "Fox is superb on the details of ball games," Blythe went on to write that he is "not so great on the social and cultural forces that may underlie them. Neither the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, author of the classic 'Homo Ludens' ('Man the Player'), nor the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, with his influential concept of 'deep play,' is in danger of losing his supremacy as a theorist, although both are duly cited here. Mr. Fox likes to toss a lot of other people's ideas into the air, and they land where they will."
But, Blythe acknowledged, "what 'The Ball' sacrifices in conceptual rigor it gains in Mr. Fox's ardor for the ball games he investigates."
"He is terrific," Blythe observed, "on the bodily sensation of bygone sports, the kinesthetic pleasures of bucking your hips into an ulama ball, for instance." The result of "chronicling games with an exuberant, encyclopedic scholarship worthy of Robert Burton's 'Anatomyof Melancholy,'" is that Fox "defamiliarizes our view of sport through the sheer dint of exotic detail. A realm of behavior that we take for granted is seen anew in all of its original strangeness. The ball itself -- whether made of grass and beeswax, opossum pelts, kangarooscrotums or seal hides -- is depicted freshly as an extraordinary invention of human happiness."
Vikas Turakhia is a critic and teacher at Orange High School in Pepper Pike, Ohio.