You get the picture, and that's what Tom Perrotta does best: paint careful, ironic portraits of life as we really know it. Survivors we follow include Kevin, whose nuclear family remains behind, but not intact: his daughter, Jem, was with her childhood best friend who vanished, and she can't quite cope with fashioning her high-school identity. His son, Tom, has left college to follow a character named "Holy Wayne," a combo platter of Jim Bakker and David Koresh. Saddest of all, Kevin's wife, Laurie, has joined a new religious movement known as the "Guilty Remnant," or "G.R.," people who wear all white, follow townspeople whom they suspect of sin, and smoke at all times in public "to remind people of what happened."
When Perrotta focuses on characters, he can't be beat. Kevin's love interest, Nora Durst (who lost her husband and two small children), is so real that you might find yourself searching a mental Rolodex to remember how you know her. The friendship that grows between Laurie and her fellow G.R. member Melissa has real poignancy. Unfortunately, it's in the subplot involving those two that Perrotta has the most trouble maintaining his otherwise laser-keen tone.
Fortunately, the plots (which also include Tom's cross-country journey with one of Holy Wayne's very young and beautiful wives) come together at last, seamlessly. The final pages have a sweet humanity, the kind we all hope for before the sweet by-and-by. --Bethanne Patrick, freelance book critic, aka @TheBookMaven