Rumaan Alam’s ‘World’ is the ideal read for unsettled times
Author’s third novel tackles consumer culture, race and other big ideas.
In a time of global pandemic, racial justice uprising, and widespread economic hardship, Rumaan Alam’s third novel, “Leave the World Behind” (Ecco, 256 pp., ★★★★), may be the best thing you can read about one of the worst things you can imagine. A perfectlyengineered thrill ride that is also a novel of ideas, “Leave the World Behind” combines deft prose, a pitiless view of consumer culture and a few truly shocking moments.
Brooklynites Amanda and Clay have driven to the Long Island Airbnb they can almost afford for a summer week where they hope to let go of work and money stress – he’s a professor; she’s an account director – and enjoy the borrowed ease that comes from visiting wealth: central air conditioning, wide-plank floors, gray marble kitchen counters, and a lush pool their kids (Archie, 15, and Rose, a bit younger) plunge into right away.
But when the owners of the house, G.H. and Ruth, arrive unexpectedly one night with a story of a citywide blackout and a request to stay, the four adults are in uneasy waters. G.H. and Ruth are Black and affluent; Clay and Amanda are middle-class and white. Disparities in race and social status drive a tense undercurrent beneath their mostly polite but strained interactions.
What begins as sharp commentary on social milieu widens into something less definitive, more interesting. Interrupting the narration are blinding flashforwards that seem to come from a larger awareness than any of the characters could possess, and these brief glimpses read like surreal nightmares in miniature: a man fatally trapped in a subway, an illness growing inside someone, a mass migration of deer.
Alam’s novel pushes at the confines of the form, asking readers to veer away from the central story to consider other lives, other experiences. One of the panicky sorrows of the frantic crisis portrayed in “Leave the World Behind” is the realization that we need others, and that we will reject others in their hour of need.
This is brought home powerfully in an understated but brutal scene when G.H. mistakes his boss-worker relationship with a local handyman for friendship, an alliance. Or when one of the parents has this thought: “It was a hell of a thing to not be able to keep your kid safe. Was this how everyone felt? Was this, finally, what it was to be a human?”
It is a tribute to Alam’s skill that the existential horror of such questions doesn’t just intensify his characters’ white-knuckle situation, but truly deepens the novel as a whole, making truths that are difficult and clear-eyed.
“Leave the World Behind” is an exceptional read that will stay with you long after you’ve sped through its final pages.