On the road to a scary future
RUMAAN ALAM’S elegant novel presents a scenario familiar to many readers of contemporary fiction in 2020: a mass power meltdown. Alam’s particularly fine iteration (which sits alongside examples from Don DeLillo, Lydia Millet and the new Jonathan Lethem, reviewed below) is set in New York State, into whose empty countryside city dwellers Clay and Amanda have driven for a week’s holiday with their two teenage children.
The holiday house is perfect – isolated, immaculately decorated, expensively kitted out – and the family are almost starting to imagine it theirs when one evening there is a knock at the door.
The owners, older, black, impeccably polite, need to move back in. There has been an event, no one knows quite what, but all electricity is down.
Alam (inset, above) controls the tension by almost imperceptible degrees – a tweak here, a tug there, the impact akin to someone subtly changing the furniture every time you leave the room. Clay drives out to the town to see what details he can find and gets horribly lost. Rose, the daughter, sees a vast herd of deer fleetingly in the garden.
Yet this is not a typical dystopian thriller, rather a novel that initially induces panic from its slow-build speculation of horror. There are gathering nightmares here but they take place largely off stage, like echoes from a distant world.
As the four grapple with subtly negotiated issues of race, entitlement and, inevitably, the existential crisis induced by a phone’s implacable blank screen, Alam carefully drops in ominous authorial details that deftly skewer Clay and Amanda’s deluded persistence in thinking they can return to their lovely middle-class life.