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Book Review: ‘The Leftovers’ by Tom Perrotta

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It’s a virtual axiom among those who believe in the Rapture– the belief that true Christians will be swept to heaven, leaving sinners behind to face a terrible Tribulation — that they themselves will be among the elect.

The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta.

 

What makes Tom Perrotta’s new novel, “The Leftovers,” so facinating is that when it comes, a Rapture-like event is indiscriminate.

Some of the loudest voices rejecting the term Rapture in the novel, Perrotta writes, “belonged to Christians themselves, who couldn’t help noticing that many of the people who had disappeared on Oct. 1 — Hindus and Buddhists and Muslims and Jews and atheists and animists and homosexuals and Eskimos and Mormons and Zoroastrians, whatever the heck they were — hadn’t accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior. … An indiscriminate Rapture was no Rapture at all.”

That makes for a top-notch, novel about those “left behind.” Oddball religious movements crop up, such as the Guilty Remnant, who adopt silence and cigarettes to remind themselves of their (and others’) sins, and the hug-peddling prophet Holy Wayne, who turns out to have a problem with underage girls.

The author gives us the Garvey family as a focal point, though they have not lost anyone to the “sudden departure.” Kevin, mayor of the small town of Mapleton, must keep up a good front when his wife Laurie joins the Guilty Remnant, but he’s terribly lonely. His daughter Jill, who was in the room when a friend was spirited away, battles conflicted feelings and toys with leaving her home. Son Tom tries to protect a young Holy Wayne acolyte made pregnant by the charlatan.

The book is sometimes funny and observant, but in the end, deeply melancholy. Perrotta’s compassion for his characters never sets them up as heroes or villains. In the end, it’s small things, and simple love, that will sustain humanity, whatever happens.

Mormonism: Post-Christian, maybe, but hardly Christian

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If Mitt Romney is elected president in November, it will be an event of historic significance. Perhaps not quite as historic as in 2008 when Americans elected the first African-American president. Nonetheless, it will be striking: Romney will be the first arguably non-Christian — let’s say “post-Christian” — elected to the office.

Should it come to pass, this would be a significant sea change in a nation that heretofore could barely bring itself to elect a Catholic, i.e. a member of the oldest Christian faith extant.

Yes, I hear you. I hear all the objections, the furious renunciations. Let me just say that I do not make the argument lightly, I am far from the first, and I do not intend it as an insult in any way to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, better known as Mormons.

First, let me acknowledge that most Mormons think of themselves as Christians. Many take offense at the notion that they are not and it’s widely agreed that Mormon culture squares neatly with that of conservative Christianity. But they do not get the final word.

Just as Barack Obama represented a kind of a transitional stage between black and white — his father was African, his mother Caucasian American — Romney’s Mormonism occupies a kind of nuanced in-between when it comes to religion. There is no doubt that Jesus, the indisputable center of the Christian faith, figures prominently in Mormonism. But it’s also true that the Mormon understanding of Jesus, God and other tenets varies significantly from those of traditional Christianity.

Mormonism is an evolution and outgrowth of Christianity, just as Christianity was an evolution and outgrowth of Judaism, as Buddhism evolved out of Hinduism. Many faiths that arrived after Christianity flowered give Jesus a role, even a central role, but no one would call them Christian. To say that Jesus is central to a faith is not to say that faith is Christian.

Take, for example, Islam.

Muslims consider Jesus to be a messenger of god and, indeed, the messiah. He is mentioned frequently in the Quran and while Muslims do not believe he was crucified, they do accept that he ascended into heaven to be with God. Some believe he will return on the Day of Judgment.

But there are critical differences. Because Jesus was not crucified, he did not die for the sins of humanity. There is no trinity in Islam and perhaps most importantly, he was a mortal, not the son of God.

Mormonism, founded in the 1840s is different from traditional Christianity in so many crucial ways it’s fair to say that it, like Islam, is an evolution from the earlier faith (making no value judgment on the evolution). Here are just a handful of key differences:

Mormonism disputes that the Bible is a completed work. As Islam added the Quran to the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament, the new American religion added the Book of Mormon.

Christianity holds that Jesus is God — inseparable, along with the Holy Spirit. Mormonism teaches that Jesus is a god, in fact, a mortal who achieved the status of a god (which is available to other mortals).

God, in Mormonism, “has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s” (from “Doctrine and Covenants, 130:22). He was at one time a human being and he has a wife, the Heavenly Mother.

Those are some pretty notable differences.

But I don’t make such a controversial argument simply to provoke. Rather, I make it to celebrate the ever-so gradual shedding of various “tests” we have imposed upon ourselves when it comes to electing presidents. If you aren’t male, white and (almost always) a demonstrative Protestant, you haven’t got a chance.

When it comes to religion, we have chugged happily along in spiritual violation of the Constitution, which reads, “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

And frankly, the fact that no woman has ever come close to becoming president is evidence of deep-seated sexism, though I suppose Hillary Clinton in 2008 was progress. Meanwhile, around the world there’s been Thatcher, Gandhi, Merkel, Benazir Bhutto and Megawati Sukarnoputri — even Islamic nations are ahead of us — the list goes on.

Romney clearly feels a need to downplay or hide the religion of his birth, and unfortunately, his instincts are almost certainly right.

In a saner world, that wouldn’t matter. Neither would a candidate’s age, race, sexual identity, creed, class,religion, nor even lack of religion.

Algebra and Curiosity

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Looking in amazement last week at the first full-resolution images of Mars sent back to us from the Curiosity rover, I heard echoes of buzz-kill pragmatists in my brain.

“Space exploration is a waste of money! How many jobs does it create in the real world, huh? NASA is just another government boondoggle. We should be using that money to cut taxes/pay for health care/insert favorite pet cause here.”

Impractical, insanely expensive … and all for a few photos and a handful of experiments to keep a few scientists (aka hoaxers) on the government dole. Space exploration and research isn’t necessary. Let’s be practical, here.

There will in fact be real-world applications for the knowledge gleaned from further study of our closest celestial neighbor (the moon being more like an adult child living in the garage). But even if there weren’t, mightn’t it be worth the trip(s) simply for the joy of discovery, of awe and wonder?

The gimlet-eyed economic fundamentalist types will say no; they’ll say a thing is worth only what it can bring in the free market. Wonder and awe? Yeah, yeah, we’ve got Hollywood for all that stuff.

Most of us aren’t fundamentalists of that stripe, but our culture is being dragged down into a gray pit of such economic pragmatism. We have meekly accepted the role of consumer, thrust upon us in a bait-and-switch with that impractical former ideal of the citizen — and the human. In the aggregate, we have allowed ourselves to be identified merely as cogs in an economic machine, and the absolute best, highest goal is to make a lot of money.

No surprise then that “pragmatists” now push a blandly vocational agenda, in which the only valid purpose of education is to prepare all the little human-bots to assume their place in the mighty money machine.

Nobody should study history or English or theater or poli sci any more. Forget what your passion is, your interests, and choose from the three disciplines in which you can find a “good job” : engineering, computer stuff, business. And if you are sure you can get in to med or law school, you have a wider selection — but only if you are sure. Remember, the only point of education is to prepare you for the workplace.

Meanwhile, poli sci professor Andrew Hacker caused a stir with a July 28 New York Times piece, “Is Algebra Necessary?” He more or less argues that algebra is too hard, and anyway, it isn’t going to help anyone get that chimerical “good job.”

Hacker argues, “Mathematics is used as a hoop, a badge, a totem to impress outsiders and elevate a profession’s status.”

While I like his ideas about presenting students with classes about the applications of math in history, art and culture, dumping algebra — while other nations, from South Korea to India expect students to do the hard work of learning it — is just another symptom of a society that is accepting a stripped down, dollar-driven notion of education.

Because really, why teach impractical algebra? Useless history? Why ask students to read Moliere or Faulkner or Austen? The rest of the world speaks English, so why bother learning some other language? Theater, dance, film, art, music, architecture, for God’s sake? Please.

Instead, we should put away such childish things by, say, sixth grade and get kids on the road to a “good job.” Perhaps accounting in seventh grade, an Excel, Word and PowerPoint course in eighth grade, some basic html to build on by ninth grade for those who care about such things. Definitely teach ’em how to write a solid resume and skills for job interviews, right down to the appropriate attire. I guess a basic investment course makes sense, too.

If, of course, any students actually show an interest in the holy grail of STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — well, we can steer them that way. Perhaps they should be sequestered, lest their minds be tainted with anything less practical; obviously nobody is going to take an interest in such things if they haven’t by middle school, right?

Well-rounded students with the ability to make connections and understand humanity and its cultures? Renaissance young women or men? Sorry. Not marketable. All students need to know is what their next employer will require of them. No more, no less.

Advice to students: Get busy preparing your self for that good job … and forget. Because that old-fashioned thirst for knowledge, the sheer human enjoyment of learning for learning’s sake, the desire to express it all in art, poetry, music, all that’s passé.

What about curiosity — and Curiosity? If it won’t get you a “better job,” we advise you to get back to work.

The myth of the violent mentally ill

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Before the shock at yet another horrifying mass shooting in America even begins to fade, two things reliably occur.

First, arguments about guns and gun control rise quickly to a fever pitch, offering much heat but little new light on a much-debated topic.

Then, just as reflexively, we start hearing a lot of “crazy” talk: Barely considered assertions that because someone like Holmes did something deranged he (virtually never “she”) must then be, de facto, mentally ill. This soon segues into policy debates about whether better mental health services (or — seriously — magical human-nature detection technology) could somehow identify all these crazy killers before the fact (as in Philip K. Dick’s mind-bending story, “The Minority Report”).

It’s no different this time, following James Holmes’ frenzied attack, in which he shot 70 people at a midnight showing of “The Dark Knight Rises” in Aurora, killing 12.

Even smart, compassionate friends are prone to say things like, “This young shooter’s mental illness wouldn’t necessarily be known to the public because of privacy laws” and “If only he’d gotten help.”

But just because someone does something deranged (a better, less-loaded word than “crazy”) does not mean he or she has a mental illness.

Mental illness is just that, an illness. It has discrete symptoms, it can be diagnosed, and it is often treated quite successfully through a variety of means, including medication and therapy. There are many flavors of mental illness, none easy for the sufferer to bear, from depression to bipolar, schizophrenia to panic disorder, borderline personality disorder to PTSD.

“Mental illnesses are medical conditions that disrupt a person’s thinking, feeling, mood, ability to relate to others and daily functioning,” according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “Just as diabetes is a disorder of the pancreas, mental illnesses are medical conditions that often result in a diminished capacity for coping with the ordinary demands of life.”

The idea that someone who does something deranged must be mentally ill is utterly false. Perfectly “normal” people — think Anders Breivik, the right-wing terrorist who systematically slaughtered 77 of his fellow Norwegians or Pol Pot, the brutal dictator who murdered millions of Cambodians — do horrific things.

But here’s what’s even more important: Mentally ill people generally are no more violent than those without a diagnosis. Unfortunately, part of the stigma surrounding mental illness has led many Americans to believe otherwise.

According to a January 2011 article in the Harvard Mental Health Letter, a 2006 national survey found that 60 percent of Americans “thought that people with schizophrenia were likely to act violently toward someone else, while 32 percent thought that people with major depression were likely to do so.”

A deep, wide-ranging “violence risk assessment study” done in 2005 by the MacArthur Research Network for Mental Health and the Law found that 18 percent of people with a psychiatric disorder committed at least one act of violence a year.

Whoa! That’s no trifle.

However, the study also found that 31 percent of people with “dual diagnosis” of substance abuse and psychiatric disorder committed violence at least once a year. “This confirmed other research that substance abuse is a key contributor to violent behavior.”

But wait! There’s more:

The study “found no significant difference in the rates of violence among people with mental illness and other people living in the same neighborhood. In other words, after controlling for substance use, rates of violence reported in the study may reflect factors common to a particular neighborhood rather than the symptoms of a psychiatric disorder.”

In fact, people with mental illness really aren’t any more dangerous than anyone else. But substance abusers, whether there is concurrent mental illness or not, are a very serious threat.

This is not a petty matter of semantics. The stigmatization of mental illness actually can cause great suffering. Stigma can keep people from seeking out professional help and community. When we assume that the latest mass killer is or must be mentally ill, we’re contributing to the problem.

But on a psychological level, snapping to such labels probably allows the rest of us to turn an alleged killer like Holmes into The Other, safely tucked away into a category of human that’s Not Us or Anybody We Know.

There is an interesting image floating around Facebook that brings this to a fine and damning point: If Holmes had been a Muslim, he would have been labeled a terrorist; if black, a thug and criminal; but because he’s white, the quick-and-easy tag is mental illness.

People do horrible things. All the time. That doesn’t make them mentally ill. We should never fool ourselves into thinking that the universe is so obliging as to provide convenient labels and excuses to explain away all such suffering.

Book Review: ‘Alif the Unseen’ by G. Willow Wilson

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Every once in a while a fiction writer just happens to anticipate real-world events, giving his or her imagined narrative special poignancy.

That’s the case with former Boulder resident G. Willow Wilson’s debut novel “Alif the Unseen” (her fascinating memoir of converting to Islam was published in 2010). The novel was delivered in February 2011, on the razor-edged cusp of the so-called Arab Spring, giving it an “eerie prescience,” according to one editor at Grove Press.

But if this were just one more politically tinged tome, it would probably suffer the fate of an unfortunate genie, stuck in a bottle with little chance of future escape. Its time would be as fleeting as the initial promise of the uprisings in the Middle East.

Thankfully, “Alif the Unseen” is much more than a political novel. There are politics, but if anything, they form a kind of canvas on which Wilson has painted her much more enduring tale.

Like Neil Gaiman, she has deftly blended the magical and modern in a story that argues for the importance of story — and the kind of belief that lies beyond the shallows of superstition. It’s a satisfying modern tale inhabited by those desert daemons or spirits known as djinn.

The half-Indian Alif is in fact the nom de computer of a young man living in an unnamed Persian Gulf nation governed by wealthy, no doubt oil-soaked autocrats. But he is a kind of 21st century freedom fighter, hosting what he thinks of as the “digital peasantry,” whether they are peddling ferocious Islam, socialism or raucous sexual imagery (as popular in the Islamic world, apparently, as anywhere else).

He’s also a human window into a world that is as alien as Mars or Venus to many Americans. He and his friends curse up a storm and he thinks constantly about girls. In other words, he’s nothing like the seething, bearded terrorists so often imagined by middle Americans when they think “Middle East.” Alif’s got a poster of Robert Smith on his wall, for Allah’s sake! And how many Americans knew that Lebanese pop stars got away with thinly veiled — sorry — metaphors such as “the intense longing of the peach for the banana.” The novel is laced with such wry humor.

But when Alif almost miraculously creates a “botnet” that can identify the girl he loves, no matter what device she’s using — via keystroke style, vocabulary and other means — he suddenly finds himself the subject of dangerous scrutiny by a government that would love to have such a tool in its hands, to fight agitators. And it just so happens that the girl he loves, Intisar — they had been intimate, courtesy of a mail-order “marriage certificate,” but she rejected him because of his mother’s non-Arab blood — is betrothed to a nobleman who goes by the online moniker the Hand of God. He’s at the forefront of the official effort to take down any and all Internet rebels.

And so Alif must go on the run with his neighbor, an extremely likable young woman named Dina, who just happens to be a deeply devout Muslim who has “taken the veil.”

But they are not quite alone. They’ve received a mysterious gift: an ancient text called “The Thousand and One Days,” which may or may not have been created by djinn and may contain an entirely new computer technology… based on metaphor. They also have the help of the enigmatic Vikram the Vampire… who may or may not be anything more than a shady character.

Wilson’s debut is a rollicking adventure along the lines of the “new young adult” craze. Think Gaiman, Colorado’s own Paolo Bacigalupi, Cory Doctorow’s “Little Brother” — with an edgier vocabulary: plenty of F-bombs and even a C-bomb. At heart, it is a descendant of Tolkien, a story of “little people” rising up to fight a kind of Dark Lord, with a rewarding multi-cultural bent.

But as much as the novel argues for the importance of story, Wilson has given us much more than that. She’s got a lot of things on her mind. Particularly moving is the idea that we are losing our way spiritually, even as the world seems to be receding into religiosity; Wilson’s view of Islam seems deeply influenced by Sufism.

Says one djinn, “Superstition is thriving. Pedantry is thriving. Sectarianism is thriving. Belief is dying out.”

Wilson is young enough to fully embrace technology as if there is no downside. Of course, those older than Alif might have a different take — in our world… ahem… and theirs — and the djinn themselves are a welcome throwback to what some may see as a simpler time.

“Alif the Unseen” is a prodigious plunge into fantastical worlds — of both the djinn and modern Arab youth — that shouldn’t scare off “non fantasy” readers. Simply put, it’s a lot of fun, and offers plenty to think about.

‘Alif the Unseen’ by G. Willow Wilson. Grove, 320 pp. $25.

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